Thank you. Matthew Yglesias:

Intelligence matters. The job of the president of the United States is not to love his wife; it’s to manage a wide range of complicated issues. That requires character, yes, but not the kind of character measured by private virtues like fidelity to spouse and frequency of quotations from Scripture. Yet it also requires intelligence. It requires intellectual curiosity, an ability to familiarize oneself with a broad range of views, the capacity — yes — to grasp nuances, to foresee the potential ramifications of one’s decisions, and, simply, to think things through. Four years ago, these were not considered necessary pieces of presidential equipment. Today, they have to be.

How did the GOP ever convince us otherwise? Don’t we want our President to be one of the smartest people in the room at any given moment? This issue drove me out of my mind in 2000. When, after the debates, the papers said that Bush won because he didn’t make a complete fool of himself, I wanted to bay at the moon. Gore acted "elitist" because he couldn’t believe he was having to share a stage with someone whose answers were as simplistic — or wrong — as Bush’s were.

Does his pronounciation of "Abu Gharib" embarrass us world-wide? Yes… not because we’re poking fun, but because our President doesn’t know the name of the prison where his soldiers are being accused of the kind of torture we associate with repressive dictatorships. Is the fact that Bush clearly didn’t know what "sovereign" meant in reference to Native American tribes a national embarrassment? Yes, not because Bush clearly can’t think on his feet, but because he clearly has no understanding whatsoever of the American government’s relation with Native American tribes.

Intelligence matters — my hope for American politics for the rest of my life is that we never see another candidate have to apologize for his intelligence.

Months ago, I caught Howard Dean on Air America, and Randi Rhodes asked him if he thought Bush was dumb. He, politically, said no, but he said the President was "intellictually incurious." He just doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t read the papers, he doesn’t read detailed briefing reports. He just doesn’t want to know.

As a teacher, I question the message he is sending to students all across America about the need for intellectual curiosity. Fortunately, his presidency has been such an abject failure, I think the kids are learning the right lessons all by themselves.