Why am I hearing all this glowing stuff about my president this fall? Oh, yeah: It’s a way of knocking Governor Palin. What a dunce, certainly as compared with that brainiac Reagan. ~Jay Nordlinger

Nordinger’s remarks reflect what seems to me to be a very strange habit on the right, which is to forego independent analysis of the merits of a candidate and base one’s judgement on the degree of hostility shown to the candidate by one’s opponents.  Ever since the cognoscenti wrongly declared Reagan to be lacking in intelligence and policy acumen, it is now gospel that any criticism of a Republican politician that says he or she is lacking in intelligence or policy acumen is equally wrong.  It might be that Reagan had demonstrated a better grasp of policy and had a greater interest in ideas than his critics gave him credit for; it does not necessarily follow that Palin is being criticized in the same inaccurate way.  Perhaps in terms of raw intelligence Reagan and Palin may not be all that different, but how did each one make use of that intelligence?  One of the standard raps against Mr. Bush is that he is not intelligent, which is not really true.  What is so much worse about Mr. Bush is that he is reasonably intelligent but seems to lack interest in learning about things he doesn’t know, and he seems unusually resistant to information that does not conform to his assumptions.  Palin displays many of the same characteristics, but in addition to an apparent lack of curiosity there is apparently a kind of resentment of those who know more than she does, which is the worst trait in someone not already familiar with policy matters.     

Were the Republicans to nominate for President one Mr. Camacho (warning: some profanity) and a journalist said something unflattering about his grasp of the finer points of agricultural policy, you can already hear the refrains of ”they also said Reagan was a dunce” and “who expects a candidate to know everything about price supports or to know the name of the agriculture minister of Peru?”  (Of course, no one ever asks Palin questions that are anywhere near that detailed.)  It’s as if there is no objective way to compare different candidates, so conservatives have to rely on the extent of media hostility to determine their candidates’ merits. 

Another response is to make excuses steeped in anti-intellectualism: “Palin may not know much, but she has good instincts.”  Why are the two always set in opposition to each other?  Why is it that the people with good instincts are invariably uninterested in knowledge?  How can they have good instincts if they do not have an instinct for wanting to learn more at all times?  It is undoubtedly true that Palin has practical knowledge about a number of things, but what we do not see from her defenders is any kind of argument that her practical knowledge is applicable in the position she is trying to obtain.  The argument that Palinites keep coming back to is that Palin and Reagan are the same and are being treated the same way by journalists who are supposed to be imputing stupidity to anyone who espouses a right-leaning point of view, which has the effect of diminishing Reagan rather than building up Palin.  McCain has adopted a similar argument as a way of defending his decision, and this is that many people said Reagan had no foreign policy experience (even though he understood the relevant issues in some depth) and people say the same thing about Palin, so they must therefore be wrong about Palin’s readiness.  We heard the argumentum ad Reaganum when Bush was criticized for his lack of foreign policy understanding and his lack of readiness, but using Reagan to cover Bush’s weaknesses was absolutely wrong then, and it is wrong again in this case.

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