It takes a brilliant mind to make some of the observations he made during his lifetime — a lifetime that began on this date in 1879.
By the time of his death in 1935, Rogers was the highest-paid performer in Hollywood, having made 71 movies. He also wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns."You know everybody is ignorant," he wrote in the New York Times in 1924, "only on different subjects."
In 1931, after it had been suggested that he should run for president, Rogers wrote, "A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious."
And, in a thinly veiled reference to President Calvin Coolidge's declaration a few years earlier that he did "not choose to run," Rogers wrote, "I not only 'don't choose to run' but I don't even want to leave a loophole in case I am drafted, so I won't 'choose.' I will say 'won't run' no matter how bad the country will need a comedian by that time."
Even today, more than 70 years after the plane crash in Alaska that took his life, Rogers has words of wisdom to share with the men who are vying today for the presidency.
If Barack Obama loses today's election, it would be appropriate for Democrats to reflect on this 1931 observation by Rogers: "Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with."
And if John McCain loses today's election, he and the Republicans should remember the advice Rogers offered to Al Smith after he and the Democrats lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928: "We can make this thing into a Party, instead of a Memory."
