I'm not a fan of Bush, but I wouldn't say he's dumb. I'd say he's very shrewd, to be exact.
He knows better than Kerry (and better than Gore), for example, that getting public votes has a lot more to do with selling shampoo than it does with winning debates, participating in high-minded political arguments, and trying to appeal to the public through a logic presentation of political logic. The fact is some of our best political science studies as far back as 1964, still cited today, confirmed that more than 90% of the voting public cannot put together pieces of policy. Meaning most voters will say that they like the idea of smaller government and less taxes, but at the same time will also claim to like more money spent on police and the military, social security, education -- not even making a connection between the two.
And if there's one mark of a man's intelligence, Bill Clinton misrepresented the facts to the country about his sexual conduct in the White House, and he got an impeachment vote for it. Bush employed faulty intelligence to plunge the U.S. into a war on false pretenses that has killed over 1,000 Americans (we're at a third of the death toll of the WTC tragedy and counting) and cost taxpayers over $120 billion thus far, and yet not a single person has lost as much as their job over it.
Of course you could argue that this has more to do with America's bizarre combination of puritan abhorrence of sex and lust for violence, but you could still argue it takes a pretty smart man to pull that off.
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