Obama the Smart

I've been thinking about the conventional wisdom that Barack Obama is "extremely intelligent". You hear it all the time, even from people who have nothing good to say about his politics, his policies or his pals. Indeed, the constant repetition of the claim causes one to wonder if people "doth protest too much."

I know I have not seen any evidence of it.

I have wondered whether Obama is stupid or evil. But even if he's evil, he's certainly not an "evil genius". What in the world has convinced so many otherwise normally intelligent and perspicacious people that this man is an intellectual giant?

It all seems to come down to his ability to speak well. Of course it turns out he only does that when he's reading off a teleprompter. So one might more accurately say, he reads well.

I certainly think reading is an important skill. One, according to surveys, that an unconscionable number of American lack. But it hardly makes one a genius.

His writing skills, evidenced by two autobiographies written before he was old enough to have anything to write about, have certainly been admired, but it's been strongly argued that they are the work of a ghost writer, most likely Bill Ayers, whose style they most resemble.

Then there is what the man actually says.

I have endured some exposure to video of his recitations, and I have yet to hear a deep thought expressed. He speaks in clichés, soundbites and the banal. There is one thing he is clearly not, which is the hallmark of great intelligence: original.

Barack Obama is the most pedestrian of thinkers. His mind glances off the surface of things without the slightest penetration. He has never uttered a single word that evidences a penetrating, creative or keen mind.

I believe that Barack Obama has learned the language of his ideology well. It's as though he's read three books, (Das Kapital, Rules for Radicals, and anything by Noam Chomsky, for example), and learned the words by rote. He can regurgitate them, but it's clear he doesn't understand what the concepts imply, which may explain his hesitation and stumbling when trying to answer spontaneous questions; he's accessing his limited store of ideas and concepts, trying to make the little he "knows" apply to the inquiry at hand.

He's got to make everything fit the round hole. It's the only one he's got. That's why so many of his utterances are shallow, generalized, off-point, and salted with the same vague terms like "hope" and "change" and "fairness".

Obama has not displayed an intelligence significantly above average in anything he's ever said or done. His would render a person capable of learning, and acting in the world in a reasonably successful way. It would not, however, lead to the deeply penetrating analytical skills he seems to be credited with—sans evidence—or the sort of instant grasp of situations that leaders of men require for quick, decisive, effective action and decision making.

I don't think he did well in law school. He is a man who could learn the material, but never think outside the box, innovate creatively, or develop new ideas. I expect that's why his school transcripts are not public, and why there is no record of anything he's ever written except the books. Indeed, I suggest they were written precisely to create a public record where none existed, and take our minds off the fact that there is no body of work extant by this supposedly brilliant scholar, editor, professor and legislator.

Barack Obama is a quoter of clichés, an unremarkable thinker, an uninspired intellect, an unimaginative, stumbling contemporaneous speaker, a commonplace ideologue.

This indicates anything but a brilliant mind.

It simply cannot be doubted that his most important and most politically valuable asset is his skin color. That combined with a modicum of charm, a pleasant "white" voice, moderate articulateness, and a few well crafted buzz words which capitalized on the Left's successful demonization of President Bush, created the man of the hour: he is the created product of the Perfect Storm.

Barack Obama is an average man who has been given extraordinary opportunities and who has been lifted by people and circumstance to a station far beyond his capabilities. Indeed, it would appear, by his record, that his position as an Illinois state legislator was beyond his aptitude.

We have as "President" a man totally unprepared intellectually for the rigors of the presidency. What's worse, he's apparently not even smart enough to know it. Watch him and you see an inadequate man unaware of his limitations, with way, way too much power.

It is a dangerous combination.

The Gunslinger