Imagine completing your thesis and graduating from the London School of Economics and being labeled “dumb-but-smart” by The Washington Post. I guess that’s what’s in store if you first become known for sexual acts (or non-sexual acts if you take everything Bill Clinton said as truth) with the President. Monica Lewinsky ‘s thesis had nothing to do with thongs or stained dresses and was entitled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”
The article is in the Arts and Living section and therefore doesn’t have anything to say about jury selection but does consider other celebrities who are dumb-but-smart:
Ashton Kutcher! Majored in biochemical engineering in college. (Huh?) And: Jessica Simpson, who famously didn’t know the difference between tuna and chicken, and posited that buffalo wings are made from buffalo. Simpson’s mother once told Vanity Fair that her daughter has “this, like, 160 IQ And, you know, that’s, like, a genius level.”
They note that the dumb-but-smart crowd extends to politics. They sidestep the question of whether this applies to the current President but have no qualms about bringing up a former Vice President:
But Dan “potatoe” Quayle is a good example. It is easy to remember his dumb moments, but it’s its also worth recalling that Quayle earned a law degree and was the youngest-ever senator from Indiana when he was elected. These are accomplishments that require — at the very least — emotional intelligence and some intellectual capacity, if not the genius of, say, Jessica Simpson.
Personally I think that pappy’s choice of Quayle was his way of looking for the qualities he sees in his own son. As for the previous President, they present a different category:
President Clinton, meanwhile, seems more like a smart guy who does stupid things than a stupid guy who does smart things. We’ll call this category smart-but-dumb. American history is replete with examples of people like him, bright people prone to idiotic behavior. The invasion of the Bay of Pigs is an example of what happens when smart people make dumb decisions. Also, “Ishtar.”
“He will not leave,” Sergei Stepashin, head of Russia’s accounting chamber, was quoted as saying in the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily Saturday. “I think he will find the kind of formula in which he would step down, but stay on.”
