Considering the intelligence of Barack Obama

What I want to know, if I have reason to try to figure out how smart people are, would be things like this: Are they able to comprehend, internalize, and then begin to properly use complicated concepts? If so, how quickly—are they fast learners? How about their problem-solving ability? Can they innovate, finding new ways around problems, or do they just keep going back to a few approaches that have worked for them before? Are they creative? Do they have a nose for good ideas, whether their own or someone else’s? Can they recognize when someone’s critique of their own ideas is valid, and if so, are they able to make use of that critique to improve their ideas?

As it happens, my idea of what an intelligent person looks like meshes well with that of Elaine Lafferty, former editor of Ms. magazine:

Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. . . .

For all those old enough to remember Senator Sam Ervin, the brilliant strict constitutional constructionist and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee whose patois included “I’m just a country lawyer” . . . Yup, Palin is that smart.

The question is, does this description match the reality of our president? One of the big arguments for Barack Obama from his supporters has been that he’s extremely intelligent; at this point, that’s pretty much the received wisdom. I’m increasingly skeptical about that, though. Sure, there’s no question he’s a smart man; but the idea that he’s extremely smart essentially rests on five things:

• He went to Columbia
• He went to Harvard Law
• He’s written books
• He’s good one-on-one with people
• He’s liberal

And that’s basically it. The last comes into play because of the natural human tendency to overrate the intelligence of people who argue for positions we ourselves support—we tend to overvalue arguments that lead to conclusions we agree with, and undervalue arguments that challenge our conclusions. Thus, from the perspective of our liberal media, Barack Obama must be smarter, because he believes and argues for things which are true, than (let’s say) George W. Bush, who believes and argues for things which are not true. The fallacy, of course, is that whether we like the conclusions of an argument or not doesn’t actually say anything about the quality of that argument, and thus people aren’t actually smarter because they agree with us; but we tend to perceive them so.

As for the others? Well, yes, he went to Columbia; but if he showed any evidence of extraordinary intelligence or aptitude while there, we haven’t seen it, because the president and his supporters have been quite careful not to let us see it. This tends to suggest, of course, that his academic record there doesn’t in fact show any such evidence.

Harvard Law? Well, he clearly showed evidence of significant political skills there, getting the student body to elect him president of the law review; but beyond that? Carole Platt Liebau, who the next year would be the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review, paints an unflattering picture of his tenure there:

[W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.

A lot of the time he quote/unquote “worked from home”, which was sort of a shorthand—and people would say it sort of wryly—shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn’t around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli who’s actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.

He’s the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he’d leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.

His inaction extended beyond his indifference to running the Harvard Law Review; during his time at the law school, he wrote almost nothing for it—just a brief case comment—and nothing during his tenure as its president. That he would be allowed to run the HLR with such a thin résumé suggests that it wasn’t his abilities that kept him in the position. By way of comparison, here’s Beldar’s account of his time as an editor of the Texas Law Review:

Second-year members were required, upon penalty of being kicked off the Review, to produce, on deadline, a publishable quality “student note.” At Texas and most other top 20 law journals, such student notes tend to be not much different, either in scope or length or even quality, from the articles submitted by aspiring young law professors hoping to publish to promote their tenure prospects. We’d moved away from the earlier practice of having students write shorter, more limited “case-notes” that typically focused on a single new judicial decision, and instead encouraged more ambitious writing that would genuinely add something creative and new to the legal literature.

It was quite typical at Texas (and, I think, at most other major law reviews) that each new editor-in-chief, in fact, would be the student who, as a second-year member, had produced and published the very best student note. In the class ahead of me, my own class, and the class behind me at Texas, there was a wide-spread consensus on whose notes were the best. It is inconceivable to me that any of the three of them would have been selected to be editor-in-chief if they hadn’t written a publishable note at all. And indeed, the quality of their respective notes became the source of the each new editor-in-chief’s credibility as first among equals, final decision-maker, and the only editor permitted to use a blue pencil for his copy-editing (which no other editor would dare erase or alter without close consultation). . . .

At Texas and, I believe, most other major law reviews, the rule for members was (and I think still is): “Publish or perish, up or out.” If you didn’t produce a publishable-quality note on deadline, your name was stricken from the membership list on the masthead, you had no opportunity to become an editor, and—worst of all—you became ethically obliged to call back all those employers who’d extended you job offers in part based on a résumé credential that you were no longer entitled to claim.

Taken in conjunction with the fact that Obama didn’t do much as a young lawyer, there’s simply not a lot here to support any great claims for his intelligence.

But what about the book? Even if he didn’t write anything of significance at Harvard, he has written a couple books, and particularly Dreams from my Father. Except that there are good reasons to doubt that he did in fact write that book, for one; and for another, even if we grant him that credential, writing an engaging memoir isn’t really evidence of high intelligence. Kirby Higbe did the same thing, though with acknowledged help, and he only had a seventh-grade education.

The thing that really convinces people that the president is super-smart, though, is that he’s good at making that impression. That is, of course, no small thing; but it’s not necessarily the proof people think it is. The thing that really strikes me about the oohing and aahing over President Obama’s intelligence is how content-free it is. What I mean by that is, I see a lot of people coming away from encounters with him talking about how smart he is, but I don’t see any of them talking about any new ideas he expressed, or any startling insights. I don’t see any evidence of the products of intelligence, just of his ability to convince people he’s highly intelligent. In my experience, that’s usually a sign that the person in question is really just smart enough to fake it.

This fits: I don’t see any new ideas or insights expressed in the work of his administration, either. I don’t see any great leadership coming from his administration—rather, I see an administration that has left many of its leadership responsibilities to Congress. I see the same old ideas recycled—and when they’re met with opposition, I see the same old tired tacticsrecycled to deal with that opposition. This administration doesn’t seem able to out-argue its critics; when its initiatives flounder, it doesn’t seem to have any better ideas than to accuse its opponents of racism and call them Nazis and brown-shirts, on the one hand, and to have yet another stacked town meeting full of puffball “questions” on the other, preferably on prime-time TV.

All of which is to say, while I don’t have any doubt that President Obama is a smart man and a gifted campaigner, I don’t see any significant evidence of his intelligence beyond the fact of his election. On the basis of his record, what I see is a smart man, but far from a brilliant one, whose intelligence has been largely focused on impressing people, and who’s very good at doing that, both one-on-one and on the large scale of a political campaign. I don’t see much evidence of wisdom in any aspect of his life, and I don’t see any real evidence of an active broad-gauge intelligence.

(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)