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Dumb voters, Al Gore, and more.

Nov 22, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 10 • By THE SCRAPBOOK
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Rove's Secret Weapon: Stupid People

Disappointed Democrats have had two weeks to argue about what went wrong for John Kerry on November 2. And they've had any number of plausible theories to choose from: Too many religious conservatives came out for President Bush; too few young people came out for Kerry; and so on. But none among the most commonly circulating postmortems has yet won an enthusiastic Democratic embrace.

Except, that is, for this one: George W. Bush won reelection because . . . well, because there are just too many damn dumb people in this country, that's why. Consider the growing mountain of evidence to that effect:

You've got your pseudo-social-science, "nonpartisan" academic research: Investigators at the University of Maryland, for instance, in an October 21 report entitled "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters," conclude that Americans who persist in thinking well of their president are able to do so only because they "suppress awareness of unsettling information" and instead "cling so tightly to beliefs" that have otherwise been "visibly refuted" by the media and rejected by "the majority of people in the world."

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