[WS:] It is not necessary dumber but more delusional. My conjecture is that higher education can make people help think clearly under one set of circumstances, but can also make them more prone to delusions under a different set of circumstances (e.g. when one's self esteem is threatened.) I think many white US-ers feel their self-esteem threatened, the economy is tanking and their Amerikan dream home is losing value by the day, prospects for the future are rather dim, their once cherished political instituions are an international laughing stock and thier beloved Amerika is widely despised across the globe, and on th etop of it a black guy has a good shot at the presidency. So they come up with this delusion of "qualifications" to evade the inconvenient truth of being bigots and denizens of an internationally despised and rapidly deflating shithole.
Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------