His dwindling band of supporters seem to think so. Some of them even laud him as "the smartest President EVAH!" The rest of us aren't so sure that he's even smarter than the guy who came to snake out the drain the other day. (By the by, my nomination for smartest ever would be James Garfield, because his proof of the Pythagorean theorem using a right trapezoid was quite brilliant. Yes, I am an egghead.)
So let's talk about "smart." There's book smart, there's people smart, and when you are a politician, there's politically smart. Is Barack Obama any of those kinds of smart?
I got on this subject based on the comments of three fellows that I know and have great respect for. One said that his friend in Boulder had met Obama during the 2008 campaign season, and even had an opportunity to play basketball with him. The Boulderite opined after the experience that Obama was "not terribly bright and a crappy basketball player to boot." Another one simply stated, "I live with a genius, so I know what it looks like, and Obama isn't it." The third, a now-disillusioned 2008 Obama voter, said "I still like the guy, but he ain't very smart, is he?" Those three thoughts seem to suggest that Obama has none of the three kinds of "smart."
You would hope that he was book smart because he graduated from Harvard Law School with high honors. They can't possibly be giving such accolades to the painfully average, can they?
Beats me. All the supporting documentation is "in the wind," so to speak. We know that he graduated from Columbia without honors, awarded a political science degree, because Columbia told us so. I've puzzled and puzzed, as the Grinch would say, about how someone with a sub-par GPA managed to get admitted to Harvard Law. Surely the answer must lie in his LSAT scores. Except, we don't know his LSAT score.
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV. But I did take the LSATs, because I considered going to law school at one point. (Don't ask.) My LSAT score was very good, and if I were running for political office, I would have no problem releasing it. Ditto for my SAT scores, which were also excellent. So the only reason I can think of for someone who wants to lead the free world declining to produce those two pieces of information is that he didn't do very well on the tests.
Prove me wrong, Barry.
Okay, so some people just don't test well. Maybe he's hiding that information because he's embarrassed. He's still an academic rock star, right? He was editor of the law review and everything! What's weird about that is he never published anything during his editor stint. I mean, I wrote for my college newspaper, and the editor was also a contributor. Everything must work very differently for law reviews.
But... but... but... He's so well-spoken! He can't be a total moron! If he was extemporaneously well-spoken, I might agree. But he's not. Obama reads well from a teleprompter. When that particular electronic intelligence prosthetic is amputated, he babbles almost as incoherently as Joe Biden.
But... but... but... He wrote two books! All I have to say to that is - Did he? The guy who couldn't be arsed to publish anything in the academic journal of which he was editor, the guy who didn't clerk for a Supreme Court Justice as most Harvard Law Review editors do because it might have actually required him to write a legal brief, the guy who doesn't appear to have ever actually practiced law, preferring to be a "senior lecturer" about it, in fact planted his butt in a chair and wrote two books?
Uh huh. And I'm the queen of England.
So, he's not book smart. No big deal. He IS people smart, right?
In a word, no. People smart is either knowing how not to be a butthead yourself, or surrounding yourself with people who can tell you how to not be a butthead. Obama has failed on both accounts.
The protocol folks who had worked for the President through several administrations were fired, and replaced with individuals who didn't know the first thing about protocol. That explains the Israeli prime minister cooling his heels while the Obama family ate dinner. It explains the bizarre and inappropriate gifts. It explains Michelle touching the Queen. Cripes, even I know that you DON'T TOUCH THE QUEEN. It may seem like a silly bit of formality, but on Planet Reality, monarchs get to call their own shots. It also wasn't a particularly bright move to put someone completely inept, who just wanted to go to the parties, in the White House social secretary position. Did she think it was going to lead to a reality show or something?
Obama is also not people smart in his choices of friends and associates. Did he really crave love from the radical left so badly that he chose to surround himself with the likes of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright? Was his desire for power so enormous that criminals like Tony Rezko were invited to the party?
So no people smarts. But he's got to be politically smart. He did get elected, after all. Yeah, no winner this time either. Getting elected is a major feat. Squandering every last bit of political capital in such a short time is an AMAZING accomplishment.
Let us start with ObamaCare. It felt like date rape. "I know you say you don't want this, but you'll be glad once I do it." I don't know one single person who appreciates it now that it's done. People who chose to carry catastrophic-only policies, and can't anymore because insurance has to be "comprehensive" aren't happy. People who lost their employer-provided coverage because ObamaCare incentivizes employers to drop coverage are none too pleased. Seniors on Medicare who are losing their Medicare Advantage plans thanks to ObamaCare are VERY irate. The self-insured are flat-out livid.
In other words, it was a completely tone-deaf piece of legislation. Briefly returning to the "book smart" issue, it's somewhat ironic that this "brilliant Constitutional scholar" signed off on a law that is on the cusp of being thrown into the incinerator by the Supreme Court.
Next up is Fast & Furious. To say that arming Mexican drug cartels as a political move to try to dismantle the Second Amendment isn't smart is a gargantuan understatement.
But it's all good, because Obama loves the gays. I realize that white elephant was tossed at him by Joe Biden. Yet anyone with an ounce of political smarts would realize that, while the two of them may love the gays all day long, some of their core constituencies are creeped out by the gays. The blacks don't just think homosexuality is abnormal, which it is. Anything that only a small portion of the populace does is abnormal. No slam, just fact. On the other hand, blacks are so anti-homosexual that they invented a phrase for closet cases. They call it being on the down-low, where they have relationships with women, and sex with men.
Can I get an "ICK!" from the crowd? I know polls say that everyone says it doesn't matter, that they still love Obama despite his newly discovered gay love. I'll bet my bottom dollar that it DOES matter.
Obama attacked Mitt Romney for vacationing with the dog on the roof of the car, when the world knows he ate dogs. He attacked Mitt for cutting some dude's hair in high school, when his book says he shoved a woman in anger. He attacked Mitt for running a successful business, when he's never run ANY business in his life.
It doesn't get more politically stupid than all of that, and more. (Obama, word to the wise: Don't cheese off the Navy SEALs.)
So far, we have zero evidence of book smarts, people smarts, and political smarts. Quod erat demonstrandum, Barack Obama really is dumb as a sack of hammers.
My other favorite Latin phrase is plures mentes sine una sententia - many minds without a single thought. I believe that sums this administration up nicely.
