Another View Of Education Versus Intelligence In Politics

This was taken in its entirety from a comment to neoneocon's post about Sarah Palin. (Formatting and spelling errors have been corrected. All else is as written in the comment.)

Wandriaan wrote:

W.F. Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first hundred people of the Boston telephone book than by Harvard professors.

That says it all.

And Dennis Prager says that we live in the ‘age of stupidity’ and that one of the main reasons of that is that so many went to college and graduate school. From what I read and hear about US universities that seems perhaps not too far-fetched.

Anyway you have to be stupid to be impressed by outwardly polished speech, especially by a politician. In fact that is what scares me about Obama. It’s a shiny outside but after hours and hours listening to him I still not feel like I know the man. After listening to Sarah Palin one time for half an hour, I felt I knew her, I knew who she was.

I know who Sarah is, I don’t know who Barry or Barack or… is.

It is this kind of ‘wisdom of the street’ that you can lose by going to college as I know from my own experience.

I studied the humanities for more than three decades; it took me a long time to figure out how to become more ‘wise and perceptive on human nature’ by them. At first they only made me more arrogant and foolish.

But… I don’t know. Perhaps you simply can no longer function in US politics without becoming a soul-dead pretender like Hillary Clinton. I noticed Sarah gradually got worn out by the ugly, miserable business of national politics.

I don’t want her once again thrown out to the wolves of the libmedia. I want her to be happy with her family, friends and local community.

Let’s face it: the US, the world, we don’t deserve her. We deserve the cold fish voice of Hillary Clinton, and all the other Great Pretenders.

Indeed. At national level (and even state level in some states) we have groups of the elite who firmly believe they are the only ones capable of leading our nation. But to take a look at where we are now I'd have to say they are wrong. It appears all common sense has been bred out of those laying covert claim to American aristocracy. The days of political meritocracy have been pushed aside for now. Common sense approaches to the problems we all face have been derided and ridiculed at a time we need it most.