Obama may not be dumb…
…but Russ Smith sure is. In an article entitled, “Is Barack Obama Dumb?” he writes [emphasis mine]:
There are [the] usual caveats: Of course Obama isn’t illiterate or Bush-dumb because as Jesse Louis Jackson once said, “God doesn’t make junk,” and the intelligence-challenged just aren’t allowed near Harvard, much less become editor of that university’s Law Review.
But George W. Bush—the very model of “Bush-dumb”—was not only allowed near Harvard, he graduated from its Business School. What’s more, unlike Barack Obama, Bush is a graduate of both Harvard and Yale, having gotten his undergraduate degree from Harvard’s traditional rival Ivy.
How did the highly intelligent Russ Smith manage to miss those facts? Or has he forgotten them? Or does he think they don’t matter because, after all, Bush is Bush and everyone knows he’s stupid no matter where he went to school, whereas Obama’s schooling proves his own intellectual mettle? Or does Smith think the worth of Bush’s degrees is obviously negated by the fact that he had family connections, and yet the role of affirmative action in Obama’s academic career (which Obama himself has acknowledged) can be safely ignored?
A “bright” person may come up with a lot of dumb solutions.
AH! The liberal (lack of) standard. A call for civil discourse, except when union Democrats have the mike; raising the debt ceiling is unpatriotic, except if a Dem is in the oval office; Bush is dumb, but Obama isn’t because he went to Harvard.
To Joy Behar’s credit, she is the only person I’ve heard of thus far who recognized her own hypocrisy when called on it by Elizabeth Hasselbeck.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/04/12/elisabeth-hasselbeck-silences-joy-behar-pointing-out-bush-just-well-e
JFM,
Speaking of “bright” people, I’ve come tot he conclusion that liberal Democrats are a lot like compact flourescent lightbulbs; they take a while to reach maximum brightness, and even then the quality of the light leaves much to be desired.
Three words:
Transcripts? Test scores?
Perhaps it’s just the tendency we’ve commented on before, of some liberals being unused to having their views challenged. This is the sort of assertion that doesn’t pass basic fact-checking — meaning that no basic fact-checking was used.
He could have gotten away with this completely, had he simply said “dumb”. But no, he had to say “Bush-dumb”.
Frankly, I don’t think President Obama is dumb. I do think he’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, or as smart as people keep telling him he is. I’ve also seen no hard evidence for higher-than-average intelligence.
I think history will record Barack Obama as the closest we’ve ever come to an authentic snake-oil-salesman con artist in the White House.
Asking which politician is smarter is asking the wrong question.
I once heard my Grandpa say, “educate a fool and what have you got but an educated fool?” As a kid who was generally marked off as the class brain in school, that was painful to hear. Today I believe it is one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard anybody say.
Wisdom can succeed accompanied with even a modest amount of intelligence. Without wisdom, nothing fails so spectacularly as intelligence.
Daniel in Brookline,
“. . . the closest we’ve ever come to an authentic snake-oil-salesman . . . .”
The implication is that Obama isn’t quite yet an authentic snake-oil salesman. I would disagree with that implication.
Rickbert,
Well said! Intelligence is not wisdom just as data is not knowledge.
The most damage is done by smart people who overestimate their intelligence. Such artificial stupidity is worse than natural stupidity. Smart people who overrate themselves are especially dangerous in positions of power.
Perhaps Western populations have a larger fraction of such people than ever before.
Hopefully I have not described myself…
Gs,
Don’t you think that it’s natural for smart people who recognize their own intelligence to overrate themselves? I suspect that this happens more often than not. That’s why religion (most of which stress humility) is a powerful counterbalance to the arrogance that intelligence naturally breeds. Unfortunately in the west, we’re losing that balance on the personal level.
“”Don’t you think that it’s natural for smart people who recognize their own intelligence to overrate themselves?””
T
Ummm. Wouldn’t that make them not smart in the first place? Unchecked character issues can make a functional dumbass out of someone educated to the hilt with an encyclopedic mind. It is the difference between aquired knowledge and aquired understanding.
T Says:
Gs, Don’t you think that it’s natural for smart people who recognize their own intelligence to overrate themselves?
It’s always been a temptation. IMO modern progress and prosperity have increased its appeal.
As an aside:
Jesse Jackson may have said, “God doesn’t make junk,” but he was quoting a poster from a Glenmary Missionaries campaign dating to the mid-1960s.
SteveH writes:
“Wouldn’t that [overrating one’s own intelligence] make them not smart in the first place?”
I don’t think it makes them “not smart.” I think it makes them human. We’re all subject to ego stroking, even if it’s us stroking our own ego. IMO it’s a matter emotion over intellect.
Just one more example of prog/lib flexible standards, such as civility for thee, but not for me; unpatriotic for Dubya to raise deficit, and Pubs are not for the country when they want deficit reduced.
Which reminds me of the Humpty Dumpty quote
Or should I have said “doublethink” with respect to our friends the prog/libs?
“Stupid is as stupid does”.
BTW, Republicans dumb, Dems smart seems to have started with Franklin Roosevelt, maybe Woodrow Wilson? The only Republican president or candidate to escape the charge of being dim was Nixon, who of course is the devil incarnate.
Pingback:Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e188v4
Smith is dumb if he expects his readers not to know Bush was an Ivy grad, too. But perhaps he is not dumb in expecting his readers to have some kind of mental Berlin Wall between knowing that and considering it consciously or thinking it has some meaning.
In addition to everything else, Obama was *not* editor of the Harvard Law Review, he was president. Another fact gotten wrong by Russ Smith.
OneTimePoster: actually, he was both editor and president, although I doubt Russ Smith is aware of such subtleties. The president is the editor in chief, but he’s also an editor, and he is chosen later (by election, in Obama’s case) to be president of the law review from among the people who have already been editors.
See this:
By the way, although the above was from Obama’s Wiki entry, I have never seen any evidence that Obama’s grades were taken into account when he was selected as editor. From the research I’ve done, editors at that time could be selected on the basis of the writing competition alone, if need be. We simply don’t know whether grades were part of the criteria for selecting Obama; they may or may not have been.
I agree with T on the balancing function of humility, a virtue on the wane in an increasingly secular world. I may not be a believer myself, but even I find the secular self-righteousness of much of the left (and in the New Atheism) hard to stomach.
I see no reason why losing a belief in a Supreme Being should cause us to lose the belief that people are still the limited, frail, and foolish beings we’ve always been.
“Or does Smith think the worth of Bush’s degrees is obviously negated by the fact that he had family connections, and yet the role of affirmative action in Obama’s academic career (which Obama himself has acknowledged) can be safely ignored?”
Barack Obama’s father is a Harvard alumni. Harvard accepts 40% of legacy applicants(family connection). Can we now call him the idiot that he is?
Teh one has been sheltered, mentored, and ass kissed all his life. It is resonalbe to think he got every concieviable break at Harvaaard, while Bush earned his degrees the “old fashioned way”.
@T 16:22: “Don’t you think that it’s natural for smart people who recognize their own intelligence to overrate themselves? I suspect that this happens more often than not.”
It’s almost exactly the other way around. Take a look at the Dunning-Kruger effect. The problem isn’t that smart people over-estimate their intelligence. It’s that dumb people do. Really smart people have a much smaller cognitive deficit. Smart people know they don’t know things, and if anything. underestimate their capabilities. Obama’s problem isn’t that he is an intelligent man who thinks he’s a genius. He’s a cretin who’s been told he’s clever his whole life, and believes it. The truth is, he really isn’t very bright.
neo-neocon, we don’t even know if he was chosen based on his writing skills. I’m not aware of any extant examples of Obama’s writing, beyond the disputed authorship of his two books. There’s no objective, documented proof I am aware of as to his intelligence or ability.
Smith can say Bush Stupid because George W. simply is not glib. And he has a Texas accent which is a sure sign of teh stoopid to any damned Yankee. That’s why Illinois has such a wondeerful economy and why everyone in Texas has only one shoe and no underwear.
If I recall correctly, editors for the Law Review came from two pools: those chosen on merit, based on writing samples plus grades; and those chosen from a separate affirmative action pool. The president was elected.
According to a recently rediscovered letter-from-the-editor by HLR president Obama, the editors themselves didn’t know how they were chosen, although Obama’s defensiveness implies that he had a pretty good idea.
There’s also the fact that he graduated magna cum laude, of which one of the requirements is being in the top 10% of the class. Whereas Bush was a c-student. I’m surprised no one brought that up.
locustofTX: that may be because the magna cum laude issue was previously discussed at great length here. Apparently, when Obama was at Harvard Law, magna cum laude degrees were given out to a much higher percentage of the class.
David Gillies.
You make a good point. Really bright people, such as I might encounter from time to time in my extremely average travels, will speak with authority of issues in their field. Outside their field, if a subject comes up, they get a little smile and say, “let’s check that out”, anticipating the fun of learning something.
When you think about it, who’s most certain, most aggressively certain, about everything????
I don’t think it’s a matter of Obama–or other liberals–overestimating their intelligence. I think many of them are genuinely intelligent. The problem is that they overestimate their ability to change the way the world works. They believe they are born to rule and others are born to obey. They see themselves as social engineers whose destiny it is to bring heaven on earth.
They’re morally evil.
Of course the stupid are allowed near Harvard. That’s why they have a law school. It has a 97% graduation rate. Look it up, they brag about it.
I guess that journalists and the like would think that people who majored in the wussmanities or social-promotion sciences and stumbled into law school might be smart.
From where I sit, however, a student getting a C in calculus at Directional Podunk State University is showing more intellectual mettle than the top of the class at Harvard Law.
Hate to nit pik, but Obama was PRESIDENT of the Law Review, not the the Editor….big difference
It is not smart to overrate yourself. Therefore, smart people do not overrate themselves.
No true Scotsman? (With all due respect to Dunning-Kruger.)
West1890: no, he was both (as I wrote here).
Hubris brings on Nemesis. Problem is, Nemesis tends to create a lot of collateral damage while wreaking havoc on the hubnstic.
97% graduation? Jeez. I studied Physics at Imperial College London in the late 80’s and we were considered the creme de la creme. The dumbest guy in the whole class of 200 had smarter dandruff than Obama. We had about a 75% graduation rate. About 8% of the bloodied remnants that staggered into the third year achieved a First (equivalent to summa cum laude). Another 15%, including me, got a 2:1 (cf magna cum laude). Most of the rest got a 2:2 (cum laude). The ones that scraped it got a 3rd class degree.