Over Thanksgiving dinner, I had this very debate with my sister and brother, and I used the first two examples Cenk cites, but to no avail.  They insisted, Palin isn't dumb, she was just didn't have enough time to prepare to be a national candidate, and that's why she sounded dumb, and anyone would have been unprepared thrust into the national spotlight so quickly.  Then they basically parroted Palin's own dumb answer to O'Reilly's question by saying that we've elected a bunch of smart people and they've screwed things up, so why not a regular person like Palin.

I left this discussion shocked, because my brother and sister are smart, educated people, and while I've heard plenty of right-wingers defending Palin on TV and radio, I haven't heard it in real life.  But the shocking inability to admit that Palin is dumb, within my own family, coming from people I know to be intelligent, really really surprised me.   These examples are clear and unambiguous to me, but they refused to see it.  When I pointed out she didn't know who Hamas was, they said, "she can learn stuff like that". I was exasperated.

Now, my brother is a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger.  He is super-religious, a Bush apologist and still maintains history will judge Bush to be a great president.  But he even admits that Bush isn't the sharpest tool in the shed--he just claims that Bush surrounded himself with "the right people like Cheney, Rice and Powell". Yeah.  So we can throw out my brother's view--he's the black sheep of the family.  But my sister is politically moderate, probably liberal-leaning, and even she jumped to Palin's defense.

I think Palin is the personification of America's anti-intellectualism.  America has always had this anti-intellectual streak that grew as an offshoot of anti-elitism from the colonial days but then took on a life of its own.  The common American (even many that are intelligent and successful) dislikes and distrusts intellectuals (being intelligent and being an intellectual are not the same thing).  So as a result, Americans gravitate toward leaders who demonstrate a LACK of intellectual rigor and ability, who REJECT structured, deliberate thinking in favor of empty folksy rhetoric.  In their minds, intellectuals have had a lot of power for a long time, and the world is still messed up, so let's give some "common people" a shot. Hence Bush, and now one step further, Palin.

After that discussion with my brother and sister, I walked away for the first time legitimately frightened that Palin could win the presidency.  It's depressing.  If my brother and sister can't see she's dumb, there can easily be enough people similarly blind to get her elected.