Rove's Secret Weapon: Stupid People

Disappointed Democrats have had two weeks to argue about what went wrong for John Kerry on November 2. And they've had any number of plausible theories to choose from: Too many religious conservatives came out for President Bush; too few young people came out for Kerry; and so on. But none among the most commonly circulating postmortems has yet won an enthusiastic Democratic embrace.

Except, that is, for this one: George W. Bush won reelection because . . . well, because there are just too many damn dumb people in this country, that's why. Consider the growing mountain of evidence to that effect:

You've got your pseudo-social-science, "nonpartisan" academic research: Investigators at the University of Maryland, for instance, in an October 21 report entitled "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters," conclude that Americans who persist in thinking well of their president are able to do so only because they "suppress awareness of unsettling information" and instead "cling so tightly to beliefs" that have otherwise been "visibly refuted" by the media and rejected by "the majority of people in the world."

Then you've got your totally bogus, Internet info-hoax: Lately rocketing around the web--and landing to a warm embrace at even the most respectable of lefty blogs--has been a chart labeled "Correlation of 2004 Presidential Voting Patterns with Average IQ by State." Falsely attributing its fabricated data to a recent book on IQ and international economic development, said chart purports to demonstrate that the 16 "smartest" states in the Union all gave plurality victories to Kerry, while the 26 most cognitively disadvantaged jurisdictions all went hard for Bush. How cognitively disadvantaged are we talking, here? According to this document's anonymous author, the president's best state, Utah, has an average IQ of 87. For purposes of comparison: Koko the famous "talking" gorilla is supposed to have an IQ of 90.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence, too, like that offered by novelist Jane Smiley in a recent Slate essay about how "progressives have consistently . . . underestimate[d] the vitality of ignorance in America." Your "red state types" simply "prefer to be ignorant," Smiley reports. And she knows whereof she speaks, because "I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush."

Finally, there's House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who in two separate interviews has now made it more or less official: The Democratic party believes George W. Bush is president because most Americans are mouth-breathing hillbillies. "For the past couple of years," Pelosi told CNN's Bill Hemmer on November 5, "the Republicans have controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives," and everything's gone to hell in a handbasket. "But they were not held accountable for it because the public didn't know that they controlled all elements of government."

From now on, things will be different, though, Pelosi advised CNN's Lou Dobbs three days later. "The public now know that, again, the Republicans control the White House, the House, and the Senate, so they are responsible. They can no longer blame it on someone else as they have done for the past four years."