Let's start with the assumption that such indicators as grades and test scores, especially the records of one's adolescence, may not tell us much about one's true abilities as a mature adult. Let us note that "intelligence" is a complex set of qualities that isn't equivalent to book-learning and certainly not to rote memorization. Let us acknowledge that young people are often motivated by a heady mix of hormones, cultural pressures, and financial circumstances to attend less to their homework than they ought to, in spite of the best efforts of teachers and parents. Let us put aside the elitist belief that those who have mastered the finer points of Standard English grammar, and who can properly place Mexico on a map of the world's continents, are more worthy of graduating and becoming future leaders than their less accomplished peers. Let's talk about George W. Bush.

Actually, let's talk about Ronald Reagan first. Only an unregenerate diehard can seriously entertain the proposal that the Gipper had the brains God gave a cantaloupe even before the Alzheimer's wrested control of his mind from Nancy's astrologer. Reagan was a publicly charming, photogenic, avuncular spokesman for a conservative political coalition fueled by economic distress, blatant greed, and populist, fundamentalist reaction to the increasing secularization of the culture. Brains weren't the point.

Ronnie the dim former movie star was the perfect symbol of his movement. A political theory grounded in the idea that there is a "universal truth" for the ruling class--an academically and technologically sophisticated self-interest that is synonymous with the upward redistribution of wealth--but a different "universal truth" for the masses--an unenlightened bigotry that lays the blame for crumbling schools and a bastardized popular culture at the feet of other victims, never the profiteers--cannot hope to succeed in any coherence contest. The moral relativism at the heart of right-wing anti-relativist rhetoric must by all means remain submerged in the public campaign utterances, encrypted in a complex code so that the corporate backers, for instance, are reassured that there is no rule of law when it comes to profits, while the terrified elderly homeowners are promised that law and order are on the way to their urban neighborhoods. For the publicly-traded biotech firms, there is microbiology. For the children of the working poor, there is creationism. Just not in the same sentence.

Having this sort of elaborately self-contradictory rhetoric spouted by someone obviously bright enough to understand what he's up to is one strategy. But one lesson the power-brokers learned after the fiasco of the Nixon administration was that it's a strategy with some serious drawbacks. Although Nixon wasn't a genius, he wasn't a fool either, and he knew perfectly well when he was lying and why he was lying. Nixon was not particularly telegenic, in large measure because it really does take appreciable acting skills for a cynical manipulator to fake populist moralizing in any convincing fashion.

A great actor who was also smart was, on reflection, no solution either, since there's always the danger that a figurehead president with any gumption will, in the Nixonian parlance, "wander off the reservation." The solution was Reagan. The happy discovery that Reagan's dramatic talents tended only to improve with age solidified the consensus in the party hierarchy that this was one shit-kicker strategy. Reagan would pander to the masses, but never usurp his own throne.

George Bush the Elder, of course, was a very different cup of tea. Not even choosing a boy-toy like Dan Quayle as a running mate could convince anybody that the Original Bush didn't understand the concept of where bodies get buried. If Reagan's handlers chose Bush in order to appease the country club patricians who couldn't quite stomach the backwoods Bible-thumpers, Bush found out that Quayle, the goofy golfer, couldn't speak in the same tongues as any known party constituency. With the country beginning to feel the aftershocks of what someone's dad once called "voodoo economics," only an opponent as dorky and drama-deficient as Dukakis could have handed H. W. the victory in 1988. By 1992, of course, the Democrats had figured this out, and the stunning combination of brainy Baptist barnstorming they came up with made history.

Given the extraordinary extent to which the corporations and country-club owners have profited under eight years of Clinton's canny "bipartisanism," it's hard at first blush to see why these people would be so anxious to beat Gore. The man is, after all, even more committed to a centrist, pro-Wall Street agenda than Clinton, and clearly has a lengthy enough attention span to remember who his real friends are. And the very rich do not really care whom one sleeps with, as long as one doesn't do it during the soup course. Why go with another potentially embarrassing Republican who couldn't possibly serve them any better than Gore? If so much milk has been so free for so long, why are they trying to buy such an expensive new cow?

It's never wise, of course, to overlook the potential stupidity of the rich and greedy. But it's less a question of stupidity than of reining in the party's off-oxen. In a word, the Christian conservatives are always in danger of wandering off the reservation, too. Clintonism has been, on the whole, a bonanza for the country club set and a living nightmare for the Elmer Gantrys. Clintonism shows that you can run a corporatist, pork-barrel government on oligarchical campaign-finance principles without demonizing women who have abortions or soldiers who swing both ways. The poor, of course, do have to be sacrificed--welcome to welfare reform. (to be continued...)

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