To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't think that politics attracts the best and the brightest of America. It doesn't attract the most sincere people.
There are a lot of smart honest, progressive people who I think can be good presidents.
In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance.
Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.
You often see in Washington those who disagree you described as stupid or evil. It's one of the most unfortunate trends of modern political discourse. Portraying opponents as too dumb to know the truth but smart enough and wanting people to suffer.
Sometimes, political campaigns make decent people act and talk like perfect buffoons.
At the end of the day, Americans are not so keen on ideologues, people who have such fixed positions that they can't see any virtue in the other side's point of view.
Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands.
America focuses on being very intelligent because that's how you make more money.
Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.