at our neighborhood restaurant: a woman in her 30’s, addressing the man she was with: “Now Bush, he’s a Republican, right? and that other one, Clinton, was a Democrat?”

The man’s rejoinder, I could not hear, more’s the pity.

H.L. Mencken, an idol of my youth, is said to have written (though I can’t find a source for it) “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

In this case the woman may be of normal intelligence, but raised by coyotes out in the Great American Desert.