Sarah Palin has won several tough elections, mastered energy policy, and persuaded more than 80 percent of Alaskans that she’s doing a fine and competent job as chief executive of their state. Why then have so many pronounced her a dunce? Todd Zywicki offers an explanation. In brief:

Some thoughtful people simply have a tendency to confuse intelligence with the ability to be glib, or more precisely, to bs. And I think that is much of what it comes down to–if Palin doesn’t know the answer to a question, she just isn’t that good at making something up. Biden, by contrast, is a master bs’er, as his debate performance exhibited. As a general rule, the less informed he was about the answer to a question, the more assertive he was in answering it….