The Washington Post reports that Washington is the nation’s best-educated city.

Almost half of adult Washington area residents have college diplomas, and better than one-fifth have graduate or professional degrees. By either measure, the region has the most educated population of any large metropolitan center.

…as a metropolitan area — city and suburbs — Washington is without peer. The District is surrounded by the five best-educated counties in the country, as measured in bachelor’s degrees, a necklace of demographic pearls: Arlington, home to the Pentagon; Alexandria, the upscale Colonial city, classified by the census as its own county; Fairfax County, headquarters of Sallie Mae and the CIA; Howard County, with its massive Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; and Montgomery County, home to the National Institutes of Health. There are Washington suburbs where seemingly every neighbor is a doctor or lawyer, scientist or spy.

This is not a huge surprise to me, as I’ve always thought that the city attracted many of the nation’s finest. But perhaps this explains some of the gap between DC and the rest of the country—maybe—just maybe—Washington is smarter than, oh, Oklahoma?

That’s sort of what I think, at least, any time I see a Tea Party rally or watch Sarah Palin rally a crowd; that the disconnect in our country is not so much the fault of Washington as it is the lack of education in many American states. (Hello, Alabama.) And in this sense, (American) conservatism and ignorance correlate; you fear what you don’t know.

Just a thought…..