Ronald Reagan and the wages of stupidity

The idea for this blog post arose as I was listening to Cokie Roberts comment on Sarah Palin's upcoming book tour (transcript here: the Palin comments are at the end of the interview). Roberts notes that lots of Republicans--all the sane ones, I guess--are pretty dubious about Palin, and that David Brooks even went so far as to call her a joke, which is about as polite a way of putting the matter as I can think of, off the top of my head. But then she adds a quote from Newt Gingrich: that lots of people thought that Ronald Reagan was a joke too, at first.

Which got me to thinkin': one of the things that a lot of liberals probably won't admit to anyone anymore, not even to themselves, was just how much of a joke they thought Reagan was. All my professors at Harvard in the mid-80s did, and all my clever classmates at Harvard did, and because I was not ever brave enough to challenge that strong of a consensus I did, too. We thought he was a scary joke, to be sure: stupid, but also stupid enough to start a nuclear war. The other thing to point out is that, of course, we were correct--in this instance at least. The man was an idiot, and it wasn't just liberals and Democrats who knew it. Republicans knew it, too, but for them was a useful idiot. He was genial, and therefore popular with the people, and therefore able to sell the policies and ideas of people much smarter than him. Also, as stupid as was, he was right about the weakness of the Soviet-bloc states, and most of the smart guys, who had spent their careers in the Cold War, assuming that it would continue for a long, long while, just didn't see the Fall of Communism coming. So whether out of some sort of idiot-savant prescience or just pure dumb luck, he came out looking very good on that one question, and it turns out that it was a very big question.

The shear amount of damage that Reagan did to the United States and the rest of the world is so vast that it is hard to pinpoint any single, worst example of his influence, but in the long run this may be this: he made being stupid an acceptable quality for President of the United States, provided that the candidate is malleable and personally agreeable. George Bush Jr. should never have gotten anywhere near the levers of power. But Reagan allowed Republicans--and enough of the general public--to consider the possibility that, with a competent enough staff, the intelligence of the Commander in Chief really wasn't all that important. America was so powerful, economically and militarily, that it could muddle through.

I am certainly not the person who is going to make the argument that IQ has much if anything to do with excellence in politics. George Bush is by some accounts a quite intelligent man: by conventional measures. He's just not very wise. He lacked the judgment that was so desperately needed after that 9/11 attacks, and this country and its citizens have paid a very high price for that. But no one talks about Bush much now. Too embarrassing, maybe. They talk about Reagan.

Clearly, most of the media are afraid of criticizing Palin because they are worried about playing into her narrative of the snarky East Coast elites. But they forget one thing. The country is not in the position it was in 1985, and it can't afford someone like Ronald Reagan again. That Sarah Palin reminds anybody of the 40th President of the United States should not be an argument for her political relevance, but an argument against it. It's really time that someone had the balls to pull the Teflon off that guy.