I get contention on the point of these politicians being "smart" as a thought terminating cliche. I think at some level people feel entirely comfortable not giving a fuck about what I'm saying. Which is to say that if I pushed back about this, they'd dig their heels in on the next point in my hopeless endeavor to change hearts and minds. Kissinger was not 'smart,' the fruits of his labor were millions of deaths. It's been hard to explain how someone being educated at Harvard leaves me skeptical of their credentials. It doesn't matter to me how well spoken Buttigieg is, his rhetoric is empty and his methods are status quo up-keeping bullshit. It leaves this blindspot where libs can't believe nobody else cares that Trump did documents wrong. That doesn't make the people who impeached him his intellectual superiors. Trump's (primary) problem isn't that he was dumb at the helm, but rather that he was ratcheting an austere, fascist ideology while rolling back everything that tried to protect the planet from pollution.

Hillary had a more academic debate than Trump. Do you remember anything she said? Do you remember that time Trump said that if he were in charge, she'd be in jail? She got owned.