You knew it was just a matter of time before the Democrats played their quadrennial election trump card by claiming they (and, by extension, their voters) are -- well, you know -- smarter than the other side. This has been going on at least since the brilliant Adlai Stevenson lost consecutive elections to the dull-witted Dwight Eisenhower back in the 50s.

It continued through the decades as that ?amiable dunce,? Ronald Reagan (as Clark Clifford described him), vanquished two far-more-cerebral opponents, and that vacuous frat boy, George W. Bush, did the same. As one of the latter pair of victims, the well-spoken and nuanced Sen. John Kerry was reported to have put it, ?I can?t believe I?m losing to this idiot!?

Now the very smart political writer, Bob Herbert, has ushered in the return of this brilliant strategy -- a strategy that has elected a total of two Democratic presidents in the past 40-plus years -- by gracing the op-ed pages of the New York Times with this measured observation: ?While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I?ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.?

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