"Is my political opponent a dimbulb?"

Are liberals smarter than conservatives? If so, what are the implications for election strategy and policy? How do you measure "smart"? Is it politically correct to even ask such things? Absolutely. In this article by Jason Richwine in The American, he confirms what many liberals have claimed and suspected all along: yes, they're smarter. But there are some caveats, as there always are, such as this one: Intelligence doesn't necessarily correlate with wisdom and street smarts.

So it is clear what many people will think about conservatism in general when they hear about this study. Stankov does not draw any explicit political conclusions himself, but he doesn’t really have to. After all, smarter people usually make better choices, and smarter people are less likely to be conservative. So how are we to conclude anything but the obvious? Conservatism is stupid, right?
Just a minute. Let’s critique that logic. For one thing, the smartest people do not necessarily make the best political choices. William F. Buckley once famously declared that he would rather give control of our government to “the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, recently coined the term “clever sillies” to describe people who hold wacky political views seemingly because of—rather than despite—their high intelligence. Conservative writer John Derbyshire has also observed that political naivety exists at both extremes of the IQ distribution, not just the lower one. The reason is that brilliant people can sometimes be so consumed by abstract philosophy that they forget common sense.