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another, perverse American experiment, seemingly designed to answer this question: Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect?
Now, it’s true that Harding did our language no favors by popularizing “normalcy,” a word almost as annoying as “impactful,”
birthed
Harding supported a federal anti-lynching law and proposed a commission to investigate not only lynching but the disenfranchisement of Black voters. On October 26, 1921, he advocated racial equality in a major civil rights speech in Birmingham, Alabama. “Whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for that equality,” he declared.
It wasn’t a good sign when the eloquent abolitionist John Quincy Adams lost the 1828 presidential election to the homicidal maniac Andrew Jackson.
Neither will I try to assess a politician’s mental stability, since I think it’s safe to assume that most people who run for president are, to some extent, out of their fucking minds.
I consider myself the Ted Nugent of elitism.
His name was Ronald Reagan, and it’s in no small part thanks to him that today we can say: It’s Moronic in America. Reagan was more responsible for the rise of ignorance than for the fall of communism.
We’re confronted, then, with two opposing views of the man: Reagan as sage and Reagan as stump. I believe the truth lies somewhere in between, though its precise location is a good deal closer to stump.
By memorizing BASICO’s cue cards, Reagan was soon sufficiently rehearsed to star in a film that might be called The Man Who Knew Just Barely Enough.
Newsweek’s Emmet Hughes wrote that Reagan’s win “dramatizes the virtual bankruptcy, politically and intellectually, of a national party.”
Thanks to those trusty 5 x 8 cards, Reagan convinced voters he was well-informed enough to govern, but not a pointy-headed know-it-all like those intellectually curious hippies at UC Berkeley.
Reagan didn’t want to be seen as an intellectual. It was a fate he masterfully averted.
what’s striking is that everything Carter said right before Reagan’s legendary burn was a hundred percent true.
Unlike Ford, who tripped over facts, Reagan avoided the annoying problem of facts altogether.
Reagan demonstrated that, in the hands of a talented TV performer, one joke could sink a thousand facts. But he had enjoyed another advantage as he cruised to victory in 1980: an all-star roster of morally dubious advisers. His gang of goons included Roy Cohn, the disgraced former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and three hard-charging political consultants, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. It was hard to imagine another Republican presidential candidate assembling such a team, or coming up with a campaign slogan as winning as Reagan’s: “Let’s Make America Great Again.”
“Reagan may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.”
You might wonder how creating a crazily expensive new weapons system squared with Reagan’s inaugural pronouncement “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Once Reagan got to the White House, he decided government was the solution to a shit ton of problems: big ones, like how to monstrously increase the military arsenal of the United States, and small ones, like how to illegally increase the military arsenal of the Nicaraguan Contras. Despite his reputation as a deficit hawk, he added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined:
At least taxpayers could be assured that no future U.S. president would dare blow their precious taxes on an idiotic space force.
(Never mind that the vast majority of welfare recipients were, and still are, white.)
According to Peter Dreier, the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, “Every park bench in America—everywhere a homeless person sleeps—should have Ronald Reagan’s name on it.”
“We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night,” Reagan said in 1964. “Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”
he suggested this novel solution to the hunger problem: “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”IX
“I looked into those blue eyes, and I might as well have been looking out the window.”
you might detect a slight resemblance to Redford, as long as you squint hard and ignore the absence of charisma;
“When I looked into his eyes I could see to the back of his head.”
(We’ll discuss Quayle’s intellectual curiosity later. It won’t take long.)
Despite his best efforts, Spencer couldn’t stop his pupil from asserting that Republicans “understand the importance of bondage between parent and child,”
Traveling with Quayle, Molly Ivins wasn’t wowed. “I found him dumber than advertised,” she said. “If you put that man’s brain in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards.”
On the campaign trail, Quayle had repeatedly compared his experience in government favorably to that of John F. Kennedy; a ballsy move, to be sure, but not terribly surprising for a man who had also convinced himself that he was Robert Redford.
Fifty-eight minutes into the debate, Quayle, who’d been reliably inarticulate all night, seemed to draw on unexpected reserves of coherence to give Bentsen the perfect setup:
In the debate’s waning minutes, Quayle had no choice but to go for a Hail Mary, employing the patented Reagan technique of uncorking a totally unverifiable anecdote.
Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager and an expert at weaponizing bigotry,
In this post, Kristol soon earned the oxymoronic sobriquet “Quayle’s Brain.”
But, before you turn this data point into a decision point, remember: a college transcript is an unreliable predicter of presidential performance. Though an average student, Bush went on to become one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.
Unlike Quayle, who flailed desperately when he didn’t know something, Bush mocked knowledge as an affectation of the elites and made ignorance proof of his authenticity.
Hampered by a slim résumé and meager skills, he did what any young man with few prospects would do: he ran for Congress.
Considering that Bush clocked in for only about eight hours a week, one wonders how the Decider managed to decide the fate of the 152 men and women whose executions he approved (a record for gubernatorial serial killing surpassed only by his successor, the fellow pro-lifer Rick Perry, who offed 278).
“This case has had full analyzation and has been looked at a lot. I understand the emotionality of death row penalty cases.”
Willie Nelson once said, “I’m from Texas, and one of the reasons I like Texas is because there’s no one in control.”
The stunt helped reassure voters that, despite his academic attainments, Clinton could be dumb when necessary. (As president, he continued to demonstrate that capability, even when it was the opposite of necessary.)
He redeployed the Rose Garden strategy, claiming that Bush would be too busy governatin’ to make himself available for public viewings.
Even when talking about his native land, W. spewed nonsense impenetrable to the average Americanian.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the author of that juicy page-turner Phenomenology of Perception.
Bush became a walking mixtape of inanities. At the second debate, he declared, “We’ve got to work with Nigeria. It’s an important continent.”
(If I had to pinpoint the moment when George W. Bush became president, I’d choose December 12, 2000, the day the Supreme Court elected him.)
When Bush was a presidential candidate, his grasp of the threats facing America suggested that one of the greatest might be him.
Believing that “a key to foreign policy is to rely on reliance,” he said, “There is madmen in the ...
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in the months leading up to 9/11, when he was warned repeatedly that major terror attacks were both likely and imminent.
He received that report, a PDB infamously titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” on August 6. The document was not just urgent, it was specific, noting “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” Bush went fishing.
