PART 2: President Obama, What We Mean by "Intelligence," and What He Means by "Hope"

In  Part 1 of this article, appearing a few posts ago, -- Your Cool Hot Center had hoped to persuade you that our very smart President's policymaking proceeds from abstract thinking, from the application of theory, not deductions from observations of the world as it is.  Put another way, he governs by deduction -- reasoning from the general (theory and ideology) to the particular (legislation, regulation, and policy) rather than by induction (observing facts and reasoning upwards to the theory or general belief, from which policy then proceeds). 

The theories from which the President proceeds are predominantly found in the writings of the academic left.  The theories are highly idealistic and prescriptive, even utopian; they arise mostly a priori from the ways that liberals would like the world to be.  Some of them are highly sophisticated and subtle and have gained a wide following among faculty and students.  A lot of those students are now stalwarts of this administration and the Democratic Party.  The influence of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, about which I've briefly written before, is central. 

People who have the ability to think abstractly, and who do it well, are regarded as intelligent.  (I myself regard them in that way.)  In formulating his policies, President Obama has relied on academics who think this way and share the President's preference for abstraction. 

And that's the point I want to make here: "high intelligence" -- the ability to think abstractly and reason from creative a priori assumptions -- is a very valuable and, I think, a pretty rare thing.  It is a critical part, if not the beginning, of almost all scientific and cultural advance.  It can be inspired; it can be laboriously thought out.   But we only know if that smart brain work has reached the right result when reasoning from abstract assumptions is tested by experiment. Brilliant or difficult thoughts may turn out to be false when they're tested against actual observation.  

This is a great way to run science.   It's a great way to run a university where all that brainy work product can get debated and tested and exposed and tried and, with any luck, let loose only when it's ripe.

It's a damned bad way to run a country.  

Barack Obama is the first one to try it as his fundamental basis of governing.  An exception might be Franklin Roosevelt and his Keynesian spending on public employment, but Roosevelt faced crises that make those identified by today's political leaders (not just Dems) look ridiculous.  And it didn't work. (Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was not published until 1936, but his ideas were widely circulated -- including direct presentation to Roosevelt -- in years prior.) 

To President Obama, the United States is his laboratory. He's got a fistful of theories from the academics he admires and he's trying them out.   He has no particular reason to believe they'll work.  But that's what the theory says, that's what the smart guys believe should be tried to achieve social justice and world peace, so that's what he's going to do.

And if we lab rats don't like what it's doing to our health care, our bank accounts, our standing abroad, and our freedom generally -- well, we just don't understand the theory.  Too dumb.  You can feel the President's impatience, his dismissiveness, when challenged.  As though there's little point in dealing with present reality when his whole point is that he is the author of a new reality, arriving any day now.

That this smart guy is failing with these theories will, I think, somewhat change the way the public perceives "intelligence" generally.  It may still admire the brilliant men and women of the academy, business, the arts, but it will no longer think of their gift in quite the same way.  The IQ required for the creation of lovely theories and the corralling of abstract concepts into something understandable is not the kind of "intelligence" required to get a fractured, diverse, freedom-loving people all headed in the same direction, and in identifying and solving real problems.  Not the problems imagined by social theorists (and, regrettably, sometimes by agenda- and grant-driven scientists), but the ones that really exist for folks generally. 

That kind of leadership requires some empathy for one's constituents and some understanding of their real concerns, not the pretend crises ginned up by social scientists and promoted by the journalists who graduated from their liberal arts programs. 

Which is not to say that effective leaders are not smart.  They are.  But consider this list of modern-era presidents I believe most people would regard as effective, whether or not they agreed with the agenda:  .  Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson.    (So I'm excluding both Bushes, Carter, Obama, Kennedy (too short a tenure), and Nixon's on the bubble.)  You may think these guys were inspired, or you may think they were just politically crafty operators, or you may think they were lucky --  but a list of the top three virtues of any one of them would not include "unusually high intelligence."   Because we don't think of their particular gift of practical leadership in that way. 

Again, my point:  Obama changes this.  In the future we are going to be much more skeptical of the claims for intelligence of persons whose smarts appear mainly derived from book-larnin', and elevate our regard for the cerebral circuitry of men and women who have actually slugged it out, actually gotten a big batch of humans to change things, accomplish something.

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One last thing.

When the Obama presidency is viewed as largely experimental, we gain a better understanding of what he means by "hope."  He has used that phrase a lot, most notably in the title of his (?) book, The Audacity of Hope.  Now, when he used that phrase, he was addressing a population that, by and large, did not feel itself in a "hopeless" condition.  (Oh, there were the Bush Derangement Syndrome people whose frantic loathing of the former president may have made them think they were without hope.  Those people don't count.)


So when he used that word, he could not have meant that he was offering hope where none existed.  I think he meant -- and I'm not making a joke here -- that he had in mind to try out all these pet theories of the academic left that no politician who cared about reelection would ever attempt, and hoped that the marvelous advantages that they predicted would come to pass.  (You may recall my theory that President Obama doesn't care so very much about re-election.)

We're Barack Obama's experiment.  He's "hoping" it will work.  (In fact, we'd all better "hope.")   That he's performing it on what is, for all its present problems, still the most successful and prosperous and free political system the world has ever seen -- that's the "audacity" part.

Intelligence is a wonderful thing and it is wonderful that we have a President who possesses it.   After I published Part 1 I heard from a several people who disagreed with my premise that Barack Obama is smart.   How could anybody so smart advance such dumb policies?    Well, again -- that's my point:   People we regard as intelligent have as a characteristic that they speculate  a lot -- there's a lot of what ifs  in their thinking.   Thinking that the President is dumb because his policies are having bad results or are poorly explained to the people they affect underestimates the guy and misidentifies the source of his problem. 

Barack Obama is a gifted, intelligent person steeped in the speculations of other intelligent people.   But we are now seeing the tragedy of his inexperience and, it must be said, his laziness.  His thinking is starved by his not knowing -- or, perhaps less charitably, by his willful ignoring.  (It's widely noted how prickly he gets when he's questioned about facts.)   He doesn't care.  The results of the leftist policies he has gotten the truly pathetic Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to bully through Congress will be the new facts, his experimental data.  He hopes his experiments give the results the people he admires have predicted.

Think back.  Remember your most arrogant and ideological (which is to say, theory-bound) professor.  Now imagine him or her as President.

President Obama, What We Mean by "Intelligence," and What He Means by "Hope" -- PART 1

Whew.  A pretty grand heading, that.  My usual course in these entries is to mosey through bloggish reflections and eventually say what I want to say.  I thought you might be grateful if I got to the damned point.  So: 

(1) President Obama's high intelligence is connected to his being the first President whose policies are dominated -- not just influenced, but almost completely swamped -- by concept, theory, and ideology, and scarcely at all by political observation (or, put less kindly, by facts).

(2) His presidency will subtly alter the popular view of "intelligence," if not its clinical definition.

(3) Understanding the President's intelligence helps us understand what he means by "hope."

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I regard Barack Obama as an extremely intelligent person.  More, I regard him as the most intelligent President we have had since -- I don't know.  Long time.  

The objective evidence of this is considerable.  Although I have seen suggestions that some of his publications are not entirely his own, one does not become the President of the Harvard Law Review from his beginnings without some serious smarts.  His genuine eloquence from the podium is widely acknowledged.  It is true that personal charm -- or skillful BS -- has a lot to do with conveying the impression of intelligence.  There is also the uncertain effect of informal affirmative action.  But I'm a believer.  The guy is brainy.  He's sold me, anyway.

Barack Obama as President of Harvard Law Review (holding copy)

It's one of the reasons I wasn't all that bent when he was elected.  I heard the warnings of the Hannities and O'Reillys and their ilk, and I believed them, but I was hopeful that, like other ideologues elected to high office or appointed to the bench, he would govern more from the middle, even if somewhat left of the middle.  I thought that, like the Clintons, he would apply the political shrewdness he had shown in his political rise.   He certainly portrayed himself as willing to cast off the extreme partisanship that had characterized political discourse in recent decades.  Alas, the electorate's revulsion over Republican rule resulted in bulletproof Democratic legislative majorities, and any need he may have felt to rein in his impulses dissolved.  We should have listened to Sean and Bill and their ilk.

So I find myself asking -- how can such a smart guy be advancing such dumb policies, and saying such dumb things, and worse, things that he knows to be untrue whose untruth is easily shown and widely noted?

Ah, Steverino, you say, you believe yourself to be a smart guy and therefore you believe that any ideas that conflict with your own could only be the result of dumb thinking.  I have considered this possibility and, since it's my website, I reject it.

No, actually, I don't reject it.  I do think that the center and right and Tea Partiers, putting aside their occasionally obnoxious rhetoric and methods, are correct in their rejection of almost everything this administration has advanced. 

But my point in this post is not to prove that Barack Obama is a fraud.  He is, but the fraud is not that he has falsely conveyed an impression of intelligence.  I concede that his braininess is established.  What I want to explore is what we mean when we say that someone is "intelligent."  The President is very intelligent, but I don't want him anywhere near a position of civil authority.

Why is this?  I think it has something to do with how we understand -- what we mean by -- "intelligence."

I am fortunate in having had the opportunity to attend and teach at some of the most highly-regarded educational institutions in the United States.  I found myself frequently awed by the raw intellect of many of the men and women who taught and attended there (and simultaneously wondered what I was doing there).  Some were touched by genius.  But I recall a remark made by William F. Buckley in a debate at Harvard:  "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty." 

The measurement and meaning of intelligence is a vast topic and not one in which I have any technical background.  But there is a lay understanding of what we mean when we say someone is "highly intelligent," is there not?  And in general, don't we admire those people?  On the other hand, a lot of highly intelligent people -- not all, maybe not even most -- have some characteristics that correlate with their intelligence that are not so attractive:  dreaminess; neglect of the person; arrogance; difficulty in communicating; and -- here we go -- an preference for the abstract to the concrete.

What has all of this to do with the President?  He recently made a statement which summed up for me the reasons I have come to find the course of his Presidency so disturbing.  At a speech at the American University School of International Service a couple of weeks ago, he reportedly said:  "Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith."  Even allowing the President some rhetorical license here, it's a very revealing remark, and a silly one.  Being an American has almost everything to do with birth.  The very first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads:  "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."  

While the President knows this, he doesn't really feel its truth.  He far prefers the comfort of the abstract thought that America is not a chunk of real estate with borders, but rather a bundle of concepts that have something to do with freedom and equality and abundance and other fine things everyone should experience.  And if you value those things, if you have faith in those Americanish things, well, then you must be an American.  

It is similar to what John F. Kennedy meant when he said "Ich bin ein Berliner" -- that is, all people who love freedom are, in a sense, citizens of Berlin who had been confined by the Berlin Wall.   President Kennedy was speaking conceptually, and in his hands it was a powerful metaphor and a signal moment of the Cold War.

But President Obama wasn't just offering an attractive metaphor like Kennedy was.  He didn't just say that people who have faith in American values are Americans, a pleasant but not terribly helpful thought in the current border controversy.  He said that being born here had nothing to do with being an American.  Unlike President Kennedy's graceful formulation, President Obama's treats the metaphor as reality by expressly rejecting the fact that where you are born has anything to do with being an American. 

This is how he thinks.  Not troubled by rules, constitutions, statutes, traditions, voting.  Very impressed by academic concepts like income redistribution, enforced leveling of social status, racial preference, downplaying Islamist terror, the merits of international kowtowing, and, in general, "social justice" in all of its uncertain outcomes.  (I've commented on this unfortunate mindset here and here and here.)

Thus:  The President, like lots of intelligent people, and especially like those we regard as the very most intelligent, is more comfortable with the abstract than with the concrete, with theories than with the uncertainty of their real world application.

PART 2 of these speculations will appear in a few days.