Brainy Candidates Need Not Apply

It was what I felt instinctively the first and only time I met him, at a lunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1998. He was subtle, full of cultural and historical references, elaborating each fine argument at length, with perception and nuance. I commented to one of his aides afterward that I regrettably thought his brains could turn out to be the biggest impediment to a man like him ever occupying the White House.

All these years later, with most polls still showing George W. Bush ahead of his opponent after three debates in which Kerry proved himself more articulate and thoughtful and flexible and able to understand an increasingly dangerous world, I am afraid I may have been right. Yet it still seems inconceivable to me that someone as incompetent, incoherent and obtuse as Bush could possibly command almost half the votes of his fellow countrymen.

Is it that Americans actually like Bush's know-nothing effect? Or is it that Kerry strikes Americans as too highbrow? As pretentious? Do they see his complexity as excessive effeminate suppleness?

This anti-intellectualism has, unfortunately, a long history in the United States.

I first encountered that widespread prejudice as a 10-year-old Latin American boy in New York in 1952. It was an election year, and I was enrolled in the Dalton School on 89th Street -- a bastion of American progressives. I had no doubt that "my" candidate, Adlai Stevenson, one of the most lucid and cultured men in the nation, was going to defeat Dwight D. Eisenhower, a general who bragged that he preferred playing golf to reading a book. In a mock vote, the tally in my class was, as far as I recall, 27 to 1.

A few days later, the American people, in the real balloting, overwhelmingly chose "I like Ike" over "egghead" Adlai. When I asked my dad how people could possibly reject someone as smart and educated as Stevenson, he explained that this was a transitory aberration, the malevolent dregs of McCarthyism, which had convinced many Americans that, at a time of great national peril, being an intellectual was akin to being a traitor.

But it was not an aberration and certainly not transitory. Eleven years later, Richard Hofstadter published his "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that explored the deep roots of this wariness toward anyone "who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows," as Eisenhower himself rather wittily phrased it.