Is Obama Smart?

Bret Stephens has a piece in today's WSJ titled Is Obama Smart?  Here's his conclusion:

Then there's his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God's good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn't. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator.

Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful.

But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.

This is very reminiscent of the whole Jimmy Carter experience. The “elites” at the time raved about him as the smartest president ever – the same unlikely label many have been putting on the office's current occupant...

Congresscritters...

From my cousin Mike D.:

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz is 72 years old. Today, if Dorothy were to encounter men with:

   no brains,
   no hearts,
   and no courage...

she wouldn't be in Oz - she'd be in Congress.

Zing!