gruehls
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RE: Is Obama Smart? (WSJ Opinion)
Quote:What if Obama isn't so smart?
By:Noemie Emery | Examiner Columnist | 08/23/11 8:05 PM
Eek! Another Republican moron is running for president, and the blogs on the Left are aghast.
Another village in Texas is missing its idiot!
Another s--t-kicking cowboy has messed with their heads.
The question this time is not just whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry is dumb -- the Left claims the obvious answer is yes -- but also whether he is as dumb as George W. Bush, or even much dumber, moronic where Bush was simply "incurious," and also much less gently bred.
Either way, few on the Left doubt that neither is, as Steve Benen says, "an intellectually curious, creative thinker, capable to examining [sic] complex issues in a sophisticated way."
Fortunately we have such a thinker, "capable to examining" things to perfection, and that is the problem: President Obama is their ideal of a thinker. He is president, and he has been -- how to put it? -- a bomb.
Based on results, Perry has been more successful as governor of Texas than Obama has been as president, or as anything else he has ever tried being, in the entire whole course of his life.
In 2008, Obama was hailed as a genius, a "first rate intellect," the smartest man to ever be president, and we know now the first part is true. He is the political genius who shed 30 points in his first years in office.
He's the political genius who blew up his coalition in his first months in office, who led his party to annihilation in the 2010 midterms (while showing utter indifference to the fate of congressional Democrats), and gave the Republicans -- who were on the floor, in a coma -- more than they needed to come roaring back from the dead.
He is the policy genius who "leads from behind," whose engagement ideas have gone nowhere, whose stimulus stimulated only the deficit, whose health care "success" helped kill off his recovery, and whose efforts to create jobs all fell flat.
Almost 40 percent of the new jobs that were created happened under Perry in Texas. Liberals who fault that state for its low levels of taxes and spending might ask themselves why, if it is a hellhole, so many people go there and stay there.
Many of them are fleeing states ruled by Democrats, which have high taxes, a strong union presence and a rich array of the programs that Democrats love.
If this is idiocy, we may want some more idiots, as Lincoln once asked for more drunks in his army, rather like Gen. Grant.
The bloggers fear that he may win a second term anyhow, as there may be a difference between being "too dumb to govern," (look at Bush, for example), and being "too dumb to win."
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones thinks Perry may be too dim for even the doltish American public, while Paul Waldman thinks otherwise. "The doltish candidates seem mostly on the Republican side," he writes in the American Prospect, while only Democrats have and/or treasure intelligence.
"So while there are many things to dislike about Perry, his tiny brain" might do him no harm. But the real examples of those who campaigned well and bombed afterward are Democrats, such as Obama and Carter, whose careers peaked on the day they took office and went steadily downhill from then on.
And if Obama is brilliant, and Bush is an imbecile, how come the genius kept most of the things the dolt set in motion: the protocols for fighting the war against terror, the surge strategy, the timetables, and even, in Robert Gates and David Petraeus, some of his main appointees? Why couldn't the genius improve on the idiot's handiwork?
Maybe he isn't that bright.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/co...t-so-smart
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Is Obama Smart? (WSJ Opinion)
:dirtyvegas:
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