Texas Gov. Rick Perry, according to The Washington Post, presented himself this week at Liberty University “as a decidedly anti-intellectual candidate, making light of flunking out of some of his classes at Texas A&M University . . . .”
The first of those claims is simply inaccurate; the second is misleading.
Perry cast himself as a decidedly non-intellectual candidate, which is very different. And his jokes about flunking out were self-deprecating, not dismissive of academic achievement.
If Perry is truly anti-intellectual and believes his poor college record is something to be proud of, voters should indeed start biting their nails. It would put him in the numbskull tradition of American politics — a durable strain famously championed in 1970 by Nebraska Sen. Roman Hruska while promoting a third-rate Supreme Court nominee. “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers,” Hruska declared. “They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”
If Perry is merely non-intellectual, however, then he’s no different from most other aspirants for the highest office — not to mention a great many victors, too.
And most Americans seem to like it that way. As a result, politics may be the only career in which an Ivy League degree is treated with faint suspicion rather than as the badge of accomplishment it would be in almost any other line of work. And never mind that the past six presidential elections have been won by candidates with an Ivy pedigree. They usually glossed over that part of their resume for fear of appearing arrogant or privileged.
Dwight Eisenhower, who twice defeated the brilliant Adlai Stevenson, knew how to tap into this leveling, salt-of-the-earth sentiment. “An intellectual,” Ike jabbed, “is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”
To be sure, academia’s longstanding infatuation with the left — at times even the totalitarian left — has fueled distrust of scholars in some conservative quarters. “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory,” Bill Buckley maintained, “than by the 2,000 people on the faculty at Harvard University.”
Yet Americans, right or left, have never disdained intelligence. They’ve lionized inventors and practical geniuses such as Thomas Edison, treated Albert Einstein like a show-biz celebrity, and fallen head over heels for brilliant entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs.
If Rick Perry’s grades ought to give voters pause, it isn’t because he joked about them. And it isn’t necessarily because he got them in the first place — even Einstein notoriously failed an entrance exam to a polytechnic school. It’s because Perry’s appearance at Liberty comes on the heels of two lackluster debate performances.
Some people get bad grades because they have more interesting things to do than study. Other people get them because they can’t master complex topics.
You don’t have to be brilliant to be a good president — it may not even help — but you surely ought to be smart. And with today’s media sucking every word into the digital record, you’d better be smart enough to dance through the minefield of a campaign, too.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie didn’t become a Republican rock star because of his budget-cutting prowess. It was his ability to spar so effectively with hostile liberal opponents and journalists that quickly boosted his stature.
Can Perry rival Christie’s easy eloquence? Maybe — but so far, the odds don’t look promising.
Perry may still polish his performance and elevate substance over bravado. Barack Obama stumbled out of the gate in early primary debates, too, yet had critics gushing by the time he was through.
But the Texas governor had better hit the books soon, or those college grades of his won’t just be a laugh line. They’ll be a warning.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
