STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

Why would someone as smart as President Barack Obama is reputed to be behave as stupidly as he has in the affair over the ground zero mosque?  Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson thinks she knows.

“He is so supremely confident in his intellect that he forgets, on his way to the correct decision, to slow down and pick up not-so-gifted stragglers,” Ms. Carlson wrote Aug. 18.

One might ask Ms. Carlson which she regards as the correct decision: Mr. Obama’s apparent endorsement of the ground zero mosque Aug. 13?  Or his walkback from it the next morning?

You don’t have to be very smart to be smarter than Ms. Carlson. But the belief that Mr. Obama is very intelligent is widely held.  In a recent YouGov poll in which only 30 percent of respondents described him as honest, and 22 percent as effective, 60 percent said he was intelligent.

Yet Mr. Obama has said things — that America has 57 states; that “Austrian” is a foreign language; that Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan; that Canada has a president — which if George W. Bush said them, would have had journalists like Ms. Carlson chortling about what a dunce he was.

And the ground zero mosque controversy isn’t the first time Mr. Obama has been politically tone deaf.  His response to the Gulf oil spill brought back unfond memories of President Bush and Hurricane Katrina.  No president in the history of polling has lost so much support as fast as Mr. Obama has.  That is something remarkable in politics.  But few would regard it as especially smart.

Because all but his most rabid supporters acknowledge Mr. Obama didn’t do much of anything before being elected president, belief in his superior intellect rests chiefly on his oratorical skills.  Mr. Obama is a handsome man with a deep, rich voice.  He can sound mighty good when he reads from a teleprompter words other people have written.

But the campaign speeches which sent tingles up the leg of MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews consisted mostly of platitudes laced with narcissism.  (His nomination was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”  “We are the people we’ve been waiting for.”)

And if his oratory is the sign of his genius, why do some supporters fret Mr. Obama is a poor communicator?

“The danger here is an incoherent presidency,” David Morey, vice chair of the Core Strategy Group, who provided communications advice to the Obama 2008 campaign, told CNN’s Ed Hornick.  “(The White House has) lost control of the dialogue…They’ve just not had a coherent set of themes.”

Mr. Morey was speaking of the mosque controversy, but the problem isn’t new.  The more the president spoke out on Obamacare, the less Americans liked it.

So he isn’t Demosthenes after all.  What else might indicate Mr. Obama is a man of superior intellect?

Mr. Obama said the success of his smooth running 2008 campaign demonstrated he has the managerial skills to be president.  But candidates don’t run their own campaigns.  Such credit as is due belongs more to campaign manager David Plouffe and senior adviser David Axelrod.  And running a better campaign than John McCain did that year was not exactly a high hurdle to clear.

Mr. Obama got his undergraduate degree at Columbia, and his law degree from Harvard.  But we don’t know what his grades were, because — unlike George W. Bush, John Kerry and Al Gore — he won’t make them public.  An adoring biographer, David Remnick, said he was an “unspectacular” student at Columbia.

Mr. Obama was chosen to be president of the Harvard Law Review — which he himself at the time attributed in part to affirmative action.  But he has been the only president of the Harvard Law Review never to publish a legal article.  And instead of clerking for a federal judge, as most top Ivy League law grads do, he joined a third tier firm in Chicago, where he never tried a case.

There is Mr. Obama’s first memoir, which is beautifully written.  But another adoring biographer, Christopher Andersen, said he had help writing it from “his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers,” the former Weatherman terrorist.

“In the end, Ayers’ contributions to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant — so much so that’s the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’ own writing,” Mr. Andersen wrote in “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.”

It isn’t just gushing admirers such as Ms. Carlson and Mr. Matthews who think Barack Obama is wicked smart.  So do some of his most bitter enemies.  Whenever Mr. Obama does something that hurts the economy — as with the stimulus bill or the oil drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico — some conservatives assert he’s doing it deliberately, in pursuit of a Lenin/Alinsky/Cloward-Piven strategy of “the worse, the better.”

Given Mr. Obama’s radical roots, this can’t be ruled out.  But conservatives who impute deliberate dark motives to Mr. Obama’s economic policies begin with the supposition that anyone with an IQ above room temperature should know they would cause harm.  But most liberals, understandably, don’t think that.  That’s why there is so much surprise and dismay among them that the stimulus didn’t stimulate, and Obamacare is unpopular.

And how plausible is it that a man with an ego as large and as fragile as Mr. Obama’s would deliberately make policy decisions he knew would hold him up to scorn and ridicule?

Mr. Obama’s policies very well may destroy the American economy.  But they seem more certain to destroy the Democrat party, which I doubt is what Saul Alinsky or Professors Cloward and Piven had in mind.

You can, I suppose, have a superior intellect without demonstrating it in any way.  But it could be the reason why Mr. Obama has made so many political mistakes, and has been so unpersuasive in his public speaking is because he isn’t nearly as smart as his admirers imagine him to be.

And they aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are.