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Newt Gingrich, the man who might win tomorrow’s South Carolina primary, loves to challenge Barack Obama to a series of lengthy, un-moderated Lincoln-Douglas debates, and he did again last night. It’s the usual Newt gesture: a grandly empty suggestion that his head teems with policies of such irreducible complexity—"I think grandiose thoughts," as he put it onstage less than 24 hours ago—that they can only be expressed in the same amount of time it takes to cross the United States by balloon.

Newt boasts that these debates will be conducted without teleprompters—a shallow dig at Obama that feeds the president’s critics two satisfying lines of assault. For conservatives and liberals infuriated by Obama’s measured cadences and insistence on rhetorical balance and compromise, it suggests that his unflappability is all pretense, unsustainable in the real world that real men inhabit, where spitting is permitted and there are Islamofascists to wrestle shirtless. But it also suggests something far more satisfying to the GOP base: Newt, ever the cherub-faced and gloating prick, is implying that Barack Obama is stupid.

GOP pundits have trotted out the "Obama is stupid" charge regularly since 2008, but it’s always felt like filler—some meaningless lobbyist conjunction added before launching into another bit of pre-fab mendacity. In the last few months, however, it’s seemed more like rescue. As the GOP campaign swarmed to flat tas, Iran and Israel—like children playing soccer, shambling slackjawed after the ball—the safe rhetoric of "OBAMA DUMB!" has risen to a kind of Hulk-smash ejaculation of thoughtlessness. It’s name-calling of such inane finality that it makes rational debate cease. It obscures unsustainable policy and off-message waffling. Whenever Mitt Romney’s think-tank goblins need to change the narrative from whatever message they can’t agree on, they can switch to the message that Obama’s a stone dummy. That’s what Romney’s really saying whenever he trots out his applause-line chestnut that Obama is a good man who is "in over his head."

All the GOP candidates have indulged in at least a passive form of reductive "Obama dumb" pandering. No less august a personage than Tim Pawlenty tried it out on the stump, saying last November, "Obama, when it comes to the economy, is essentially the Barney Fife of presidents. His stumbling bumbling is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter." He used the Carter card well. We all know Carter to be stupid and bad, because he played demiurge to Ronald Reagan, Lightbringer of American Morning. Of course, T-Paw’s credentials for genius status constitute getting his ass handed to him by permanent screwhead Michele Bachmann, proposing an economic plan that violated his own balanced-budget amendment and not even qualifying for useful idiot status in the Roger Ailes menagerie.

It was in the op-ed pages of neocon sinecures where the seeds of "OBAMA DUMB" were first planted, and where they reached full throat. Bret Stephens kicked off the latest iteration of the meme in the Wall Street Journal, in a column last August titled "Is Obama Smart?", enumerating Obama’s sins with a list of banalities and comparing his performance in office (unfavorably, duh) to a presidency unobstructed by reality.

Worse, while Obama’s oratory is credible, Stephens argues that his punchiness displays a lack of substance. If only Barack could find his "Where’s the Beef?" moment, misquote a Clint Eastwood movie or dare the entire radicalized Muslim world to "bring it on" from his position as the most well-defended person on the planet.

Stephens goes on: "Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful. But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence."