There's a brand new sheriff in town, folks. Only problem is, he's a moron, Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times. Sizing up a Rick Perry–President Obama race for 2012, Dowd sees "a classic cultural collision between a skinny Eastern egghead lawyer who’s inept in Washington gunfights and a pistol-totin’, lethal-injectin’, square-shouldered cowboy who has no patience for book learnin.’" Perry even wears cowboy boots and jokes about his low grades as a student at Texas A&M. "He even got a C in gym," Dowd sighs.
This swaggering simple-mindedness makes Dowd long for George W's "Gentleman's C's" or the "sesquipedalian facility" of her schoolgirl crush, William F. Buckley Jr. Sadly, with Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann not far behind, Perry now leads "the 'How great is it to be stupid?' party." Dowd's conclusion: "The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates." (In the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker argues that Perry isn't dumb... he's just sly.)