Dana Pico of Common Sense Political Thought has a good piece today on Barack Obama's recent statement where he claimed to be on the Committee of Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, when he never has been.
More interesting to me was Pico's discussion of intellect.
I absolutely loathe the idea of Mr Obama winning the presidency, for reasons I have given before:
- He will raise taxes on all of us, despite what he says;
- He will surrender to the Islamic fascists in Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of what he says; and
- He will appoint federal judges who will try to impose a left-wing agenda rather than follow the laws as written by the legislatures.
But I’m not stupid enough to think that he is stupid. You don’t get into Harvard Law School, even if you are a beneficiary of Affirmative Action, by being stupid. And you certainly don’t get elected president of the Harvard Law Review by being a dummy.
Some of our friends on the left seem to think that John McCain is some big oaf dummy... You don’t get into the United States Naval Academy, even as a legacy, if you are stupid. And while Mr McCain finished near the bottom of his class, much of that was due to something most college graduates can’t seem to imagine: he received demerits for excessive partying, something that most collegians seem to think is a collegiate requirement. The United States Navy does not put idiots in the cockpits of high-performance jets.
It seems to me that we overly-demonize the political candidates we oppose. It is one thing to criticize a politicians policies and his apparent attitudes and even his honesty; those things can be checked, and are important. But the strange notion that one’s political opponents are somehow just plain stupid strikes me as both self-delusional and self-defeating: few battles were won by underestimating the opposition! Our friends on the left “misunderestimated” George Bush all along; did it help them?
I commented on the post and thought I'd share and expand upon my thoughts there.
I agree that this idea of considering our opponents to be unintelligent is foolhardy. But intelligent people offer up solutions that are downright stupid all the time. So something other than intelligence must be at play here. In lieu of intelligence, what we can look at is a candidate’s ability to apply logic, his areas of ignorance, his honesty (as Pico mentioned) and his hunger for power.
There are only a handful of explanations for why an intelligent person would offer up stupid policies. The candidate must either be ignorant, be applying logic poorly, be trusting advisers who are wrong for any of these reasons, be paying back his special interests, be pandering to a special interest, be lying for personal gain or be willing to promote anything that he perceives will lead to more power.
High intelligence is not historically a harbinger of presidential
success. I’d much rather have a moderately intelligent leader with a
great strong-suit in applied logic and honesty, like Ronald Reagan, than almost any
more intelligent leader the world has ever seen. Does anyone doubt that
Jimmy Carter was much smarter than Ronald Reagan? Or Walter Mondale, or
Michael Dukakis? Or Richard Nixon even?
I’ve found that intelligence, honesty and great ability in applied logic rarely coincide in one person. And those that do excel at all three are too smart, too logical and too honest to seek the office of President of the United States.
In my opinion, applied logic is the key component here. And it is very easy to make the case that Barack Obama is a complete idiot when it comes to applied logic. He makes logical leaps that make him look alternately naive or foolish in every speech I’ve ever heard him make. It must either be that, or his lust for power must be causing him to do so for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
So I concede that Pico is correct in saying we shouldn’t challenge his intellect. We should challenge his judgment. And we should challenge his honesty. There is more than enough material there.
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