Hey, if you guys want to anoint her your next JFK, I'm all for it!

It's almost never correct to judge politicians' intelligence - let alone their effectiveness as politicians - by looking at their malapropisms. Granted, politics involves more public speaking than most jobs. But many people, even very intelligent people, will say dumb things at some point if they do a lot of contemporaneous public speaking. Especially when their public speaking is reduced to writing.

You'll have to take this on faith, but I'm a pretty decent public speaker at the podium. And I like to think of myself as someone with a facility for language. But I cannot bring myself to read a transcript of any of my hearings. Because everyone looks bad in a transcript if they're not reading verbatim from prepared remarks.

You may not recall, but there was a period back on Old Fool where I found myself defending W's intelligence against his litany of misstatements and ungrammatical sentence fragments - for that same reason.

So, no - I don't think that if we postulate a similarly social-media-savvy telegenic charismatic campaigner who happens to also be a bald male running instead of AOC, that person wouldn't have achieved what she's achieved.

BTW, no one's appointing her JFK. She's more a young Bernie Sanders. Who you might have noticed is a not especially telegenic older male, but is revered by the base because he's good with the base and has the politics that match what (part of) the base wants.