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By elevating candidates who can entertain over those who can think, mass media have made the election of dunces more likely.
What happens when you combine ignorance with performing talent? A president who tells the country to inject bleach.
My preference that politicians be educated probably brands me as an elitist.
want the president of the United States to be intellectually curious for a simple reason: I think the person running the country should be smarter than I am.
just lived through the alternative, and it was only good for the liquor industry. How can we tell if a politician
The election of a serially bankrupt, functionally illiterate reality TV host was the logical consequence of the five decades preceding it, which, with apologies to Edith Wharton, I’ll call the Age of Ignorance. How did the bar for our political figures fall so far? To better understand this heinous half century, I’ve divided it into the Three Stages of Ignorance: Ridicule, Acceptance, and Celebration.
For the past twenty years or so, I’ve written a column in which I’ve made up news stories for the purpose of satire. In this book, I’ve made nothing up. All the events I’m about to describe actually happened. They’re a part of American history. Unfortunately.
hagiographies,
Reagan’s brother Neil recalled one of Ronnie’s professors at Eureka College, in Illinois, grousing that he “never opened a book.”
Reagan’s chief of staff, James Baker, left him a briefing book that remained untouched the following morning. When Baker asked why he hadn’t perused it, Reagan replied, “Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night.” Once he became the most powerful man in the world,
his television-watching habits were, by all accounts, voracious.
“Eighty percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.”
tree’s a tree,” he said in 1966, while addressing a logging trade group. “How many do you need to look at?” As
you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bull.” This approach would be tested with Reagan,
but in 1968 a savvy TV producer gave Dick a media makeover. “This is the beginning of a whole new concept,” the producer said. “This is it. This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore. The next guys up will have to be performers.” This prophet was Roger Ailes, decades away from his career as a serial sexual harasser at Fox News.
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
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.”
Same old!
He called a 1982 trip to Latin America “real fruitful,” having gleaned this mind-boggling insight: “They’re all individual countries.” Reporting on this tour, Lou Cannon wrote, “Over and over again along the way, he expressed enthusiasm in what he was seeing for the first time,
Reagan
Reagan, raising a glass at a state dinner in Brasília, offered a toast to “the people of Bolivia.” Belatedly recognizing his goof, he tried to explain it away by saying that Bolivia was where he was headed next. His next stop was Colombia; Bolivia wasn’t on his itinerary.
Reagan said, “I’m no linguist but I have been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” Reagan was half right: he was no linguist. The Russian word for freedom is svoboda.
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
Despite his reputation as a deficit hawk, he added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined: it soared from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion on his watch. (Math is yet another stupid thing.) As for the Strategic Defense Initiative, it cost American taxpayers $30 billion
Bush managed to snatch incoherence from the jaws of clarity.
out in 1954 by saying, ‘N—, n—, n—.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n—’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.” During the 1988 campaign, Atwater worked with Bush’s son George W. Bush, and they grew close. When the Horton ads catapulted his dad to victory, W. must have been impressed. He’d find bigotry useful in future campaigns of his own. Meanwhile,
winning big despite the albatross of Quayle might have emboldened him: in 1991, he tapped a man with only one year of judicial experience to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Thirty years later, the nation is still paying the price for his selection of Clarence Thomas.
Kristol was now suited for a new job: chief of staff to Dan Quayle.
the oxymoronic sobriquet “Quayle’s Brain.”
“Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.”
debate raged over whether the space inside Quayle’s head was infinite, Kristol had another genius idea: allowing the vice president to pick a fight with a popular sitcom character. Quayle started the
Embarrassingly, it emerged that Quayle had never watched Murphy Brown. The fiasco should have sent Bill Kristol into hiding, but his role in the Age of Ignorance wasn’t over. When another egregiously unqualified candidate burst onto the scene two decades later, Bill Kristol rose again, as we’ll see.
After a student named William Figueroa correctly spelled “potato” on the chalkboard, Quayle advised him, “Add a little bit to the end there… [Y]ou’re right phonetically, but…” Once he’d hectored young William into disfiguring his answer by adding an e, Quayle beamed and the assembled kids, understandably assuming that the person who might be called upon to lead the free world was better informed than their
Potato incident
Crowning himself the Decider, he made hasty choices, as if the most important goal were ending a meeting early so he could go for a jog.
“I’m not afraid to make decisions,” Bush boasted. “Matter of fact, I like this aspect of the presidency.” 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. His swaggering pride in how little he knew—and he knew very, very little—made George W. Bush the father of the second stage of ignorance: Acceptance.
fathered an illegitimate Black child. Like Yale and DKE, the Bush family tradition of appearing genteel while weaponizing bigotry was part of W.’s inheritance.
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). No biggie: living up to his
he halved the time allotted for considering a death row case, when possible, from thirty minutes to fifteen. That left plenty of time for a jog.
his controversial decision to execute Gary Graham, a convicted murderer whom many believed was innocent, Bush said, “This case has had full a...
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His signature accomplishment as governor was turning the bountiful budget surplus inherited from Ann Richards into a massive deficit, by recklessly cutting taxes. Now a rising star in the Republican Party, he wondered: Could he do to the USA what he’d done to Texas?
After Bush read (or skimmed) the Gore profile, he was far from intimidated; he was stoked. Bush had no intention of competing with Gore on the field of knowledge; instead, he’d play to win on the field of ignorance. Bush broadcast his status as a bibliophile by declaring, “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman observed that, in a political landscape dominated by television, “[W]e may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.”
years since he left office, Dubya hasn’t inspired a hagiography
(Since he also asked, famously, “Is our children learning?” one expected that his first official act as president would be to cancel the agreement between subjects and verbs.)
“facts are stupid things,” Bush thought nuance was even stupider. He told Senator Joe Biden, “Joe, I don’t do nuance.”
“In Texas, we don’t do nuance,” explaining his mental limitations as if they were a regional quirk, like chicken-frying your steak. He complained of aides “nuancing him to death,” though it’s impossible to picture Bush sitting still long enough for that to happen. Dubya
In the spring of 2002, as Condoleezza Rice met with a group of senators in the West Wing, Bush popped his head in and blurted, ...
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gradually dawned on Bush that there were weird-sounding groups of people in Iraq called Sunnis and Shiites. Baffled, he exclaimed, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”
The year the U.S. invaded Iraq, 486 American soldiers were killed, with another 2,416 wounded; 12,152 Iraqi civilians died. The number of weapons of mass destruction found stood stubbornly at zero.
The following March, he performed a comedy routine at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner, narrating slides of himself clownishly looking for WMDs in the Oval Office. “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere,” he said as a slide showed him looking under a piece of furniture. “Nope, no weapons over there,” he said,...
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‘Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?’ ”
Says it all
don’t want a president who’s just like me. I’m pretty sure I’d suck at the job. I want a president to be better than I am: smarter, braver, calmer, and more patient. When a country faces war, economic collapse, or contagion, I’m not sure it’s Miller Time. Lincoln may have been our greatest president, but he wouldn’t be in my top hundred potential drinking buddies. He could get kind of dark.
