Understanding George W. Bush. A Guide for the Left

American artists and intellectuals, writes Victor Davis Hanson, are vexed. They cannot fathom why so many of their fellow citizens continue support George W. Bush despite their most artful and nuanced protestations.

Rather than sit idly by while the heads of our chattering classes begin to explode in frustration, I would like to offer an explanation of the phenomenon they find so puzzling.

Successful artists and intellectuals are, by definition, talented communicators. A poet or a pundit who regularly struggles for words is, by definition, incompetent. If most of the people you spend time with are also in the business of communicating, you come to equate eloquence with intelligence, ability, and reason.

That equation is mistaken.

In a previous life I was a computer software engineer with a company you may have heard of. Everyone I worked with was at a minimum an able coder, but there were a few whose brilliance never ceased to impress me. One of the most brilliant, I'll call him Fred, was also one of the least eloquent. He regularly mangled the English language in ways that made me cringe. His C++ code, by contrast, was like a fugue by Bach, and his ability to debug other people's code made Sherlock Holmes look like Mr. Magoo.

Americans who work outside of academia and the arts generally know similar people whose intelligence is not reflected in their vocabulary or felicity of expression. As a result, they do not assume, as many on the left have assumed, that George Bush is a mental lightweight simply because of his tortured grammar.

As it turns out, middle America is right. A recent (and lengthy) analysis of military intelligence test scores reveals that, if anything, George Walker Bush is smarter than John Forbes Kerry.

Middle America cares more about substance than style. It cares more about veracity than verbosity. It cares more about guts than it does about hair.

That is why we will be voting for George Bush.