I assume that Sarah Palin is more intelligent than she appears in her horrendous interviews, though I would be somewhat surprised if she lived up to the descriptions quoted in the article. But it seems to me that if they are true then they also reveal what an incredibly cynical politician she must be. Her entire campaign image is that of someone railing against the elites and intellectuals, of appealing to joe sixpack, of disavowing the importance of having someone of exceptional intelligence in the White House. If she's truly a "brainiac," of enormous intellectual heft, and yet spends her time pretending to be just an aw-shucks gutsy hockey mom as a political ploy, it speaks very poorly of her views of the American electorate. Either way, she makes me queasy.

bagelwoman:

I assume that Sarah Palin is more intelligent than she appears in her horrendous interviews,

She has to be.

What's the basis for this assumption? Is it something as simple as, 'She's made it this far, so she must be smart'?

If that were the case, the finalist on any reality show would be the smartest one, right? All the participants would prove themselves to be smarter than regular people just by making it on the show.

No, there is some basis. She ran for and won a number of posts, and managed to oppose her own mother-in-law as her successor, without any indication of lasting enemies. She has been willing to gp tp some lengths to learn her jobs, and to introduce new ideas. She certainly has great confidence in her own mettle. But she also has apparently never learned any more than she absolutely needed, which produced those awful Katie Couric moments, while she searched for the answers she had been fed. Apparently, she didn't know enough to place the questions in context on her own. This isn't five colleges and a hardscrabble upbringing. It's simple disdain of knowledge for its own sake -- knowledge which might have been helpful to her when she faced Katie an Charlie Gibson. Which makes her, to me, far less admirable. And makes the woman who wrote the original article a lot more suspect.

See, that's the opposite of smart, to me.

Perhaps the more appropriate descripotr is devious, or clever rather than smart or intelligent.

She probably is "smart" if your only definition of that is capable of getting your own way by any means necessary.

"What's the basis for this assumption? Is it something as simple as, 'She's made it this far, so she must be smart'?"

Not exactly, but a bit. Keep in mind that "smarter than she appeared in her interviews" is not setting the bar particularly high. Looking at her political career and her other appearances, I see someone who is ambitious and who has a type of strategic or savvy sensibility that she uses effectively. She obviously knows how to work personal connections and use a level of personal appeal in one on one interactions to advance her agenda. I consider that to be a type of intelligence, and one that is often required to succeed in politics. I don't think it makes her qualified to lead our nation, in the absence of any indication of the type of intellectual curiosity and intelligence and knowledge that Lafferty seems to see, and I find her tactics and approach to campaigning to be flat out offensive.