Whitman's press secretary, Carl Golden, urged her to ignore the simplemindedness of some questions. He had been around long enough to know she would get questions that "are just remarkably stupid. I mean, there are reporters, the Nobel Prize for physics isn't in their future. It's just the way it is. I said, 'If you just want to smile, that's fine, but the worst thing you can do is show up a reporter in front of his colleagues. . . . They don't need you to say, "what a dumb question." They know it's dumb.You just answer it.'"

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