I love this clip from All the President’s Men. It seems to sum up so much, “The truth is, these are not very bright guys.” Deep Throat says this about the Nixon White House, but this last few weeks I’ve thought it applied equally well to the Obama White House:

I think this can generally be said about the world. My experience in life is that nothing is that hard to understand. If it seems so, you have a bad teacher. But more to the point, when I was younger, I used to think that the people who ran political campaigns must be really smart. This isn’t the case. Commentators seem shocked when a campaign does something stupid. But they shouldn’t be. The campaigns are staffed by ordinary people doing the best job they can. Campaigns are messy with lots of crises. Is anyone fooled into thinking that James Carville is brilliant? “It’s the economy, stupid”? So Carville had learned the most basic finding of political science. He must be a genius!

In the case of the Obama White House, I know everyone is smart. But they aren’t that smart. If they were, they wouldn’t be relying on Republican missteps to save them.

“Forget the myths that the media’s created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys.”