No, I wouldn't drink a beer with them either

At at time when we actually worry about how "smart" our presidential candidates are, H.L. Mencken sticks his head through cigar smoke and delivered these observations on the Warren G. Harding-James Cox presidential race of 1920. Not for him the illusions that Bill O'Reilly's "folks" know best. Living in a democracy means accepting what's most repugnant about ourselves, or worse:

We do not estimate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas; we estimate him by the honesty and effectiveness with which he maintains his own...But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental -- men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.

And here's the clincher:

So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost...But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre -- the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

Hmm. Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Honorable George W. Bush form a truly august lineage.