How much do brains matter in a President?

It happens pretty much like clockwork: In every presidential election that I can remember, voters are assured that the Republican is a brainless buffoon, and the Democrat a savvy intellectual. I first saw this with the 1976 election, when I was 15 years old and, for the first time, politically aware. Gerald Ford was presented as a big, dumb jock, who couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Jimmy Carter was a brilliant, analytical engineer.

In 1980, as you recall, Ronald Reagan was the actor/jock who had simplistic ideas. I remember going around parroting the line that you could wade through Reagan's deepest thoughts without getting your ankles wet. Carter, of course, despite his abysmal Presidential record was still, as the media repeatedly assured us, so much smarter.

By 1984, Reagan's intellectualism had fallen even lower in the media's and pundit's estimation. The guy was dumb as a rock, and spoke in stupid, infantile terms about evil, and freedom, and simplistic things like that. He had no nuance. Fortunately, the savvy (but pure) Walter Mondale was going to save us from the guy with the obvious 2 digit IQ.

Fast forward a few years to 1988, and you've got the inarticulate George H.W. Bush, who was obviously too dumb to communicate in basic English, despite his illustrious career. And on the other side, you've got the pedantic Michael Dukakis, who really did sound like a hyper-analytical university professor. He was obviously smart.

I don't need to remind you of the Clinton years. For me, they pass in a blur of paeans praising his extraordinary intelligence. The press wrote reams of laudatory columns about his ebullient wonkishness, his extraordinary ability to master complex ideas, and his lust for knowledge. The only person smarter than he was, the press assured us, was his wife, a woman who intelligently subordinated her own career to exponentially expand the power of his through their combined brains.

Wait! I forgot, there was one person smarter than Clinton -- Al Gore! Al Gore, the great genius who made Dukakis look like a fluent, witty speaker. Al Gore, the all seeing, all knowing internet inventor. It was unthinkable that George W. Bush, the ultimate buffoon, a man with a West Texas accent and a habit of speaking about "nukular" weapons, could beat this Ivy League genius. And yet the unthinkable happened. And it happened again when the even smarter and more intellectual John Kerry also went down before that buffoon. (Never mind that subsequent investigation revealed that the "buffoon" did better at Yale than either of these two shining lights.)

It should be no surprise at this point that the exact same pattern is shaping up here. Obama, as we know, is even smarter than all of his Democratic predecessors put together! He is a luminous speaker (as long as he has a script). He's a luminous writer (although his off-script speaking skills are beginning to tell me that, as much as anything else, he had a good editor). He's just plain luminous. Palin, with her non-Ivy League degree, her slightly goofy Alaska accent, her beauty queen credentials is, of course, laughable when compared to Obama, right?

Well, I'm not so sure. For the fun of it, let's accept as true that all of these Democrats are indeed infinitely more brilliant than their Republican opponents. I won't get into petty discussions about GPAs and IQs. I'm going to agree: Each Democratic candidate since at least 1976 has had -- I don't know -- heck, let's give him 40 IQ points on his Republican opponent. The question is whether, even if we accept the genius Democratic premise as true, those type of academic smarts matter.

Popular culture has always joked that those who can, do; and those who can't, teach. Growing up, as the child of a teacher, and with the assumption that I would eventually get myself a PhD (only to end up with a JD), I always thought that this olds expression was sour grapes. The correct expression in my world would have been, those who are smart excel academically and use big words; and those who aren't smart, well, they aren't smart. Life has taught me otherwise.

What I've learned is that you can be too smart for your own good. Take my father. He was a superb teacher, and a truly fascinating and erudite man, but that's not why he taught. The wages were abysmal and it would have been great if he could have held another job -- but he couldn't. His sense of intellectual superiority made him a miserable employee. He never rose past the bottom ranks because he was so deeply offended by having to work for stupid people -- a disdain he made manifes -- that those same stupid people, all of whom were further up the hierarchy than he was, made sure to keep him firmly under their thumbs. He never got fired because he was an honest and reliable worker, but he never got promoted either. So much for his brains (and they were impressive).

Or take my uncle. It is no exaggeration to say that he was the most brilliant student in the history of the Jewish Academic high school in pre-WWII Berlin. (My father, who was much younger, repeatedly heard this encomium to his older brother from teachers frustrated by the fact that my father was merely smart, and not brilliant.) Considering that the school was both German and Jewish, you can imagine the standards. My uncle was a bona fide genius. He was also a complete git.

My uncle ended his life as a low level civil servant living in squalor with his wife and adult child in a one bedroom apartment in Copenhagen. My mother, to this day, recalls how he and his family eschewed handkerchiefs, opting instead to blow their noses into their hands and then wipe their fingers on the walls.

It would be too facile to say my uncle was just another tragedy of the war, someone damaged by the the hunt from pillar to post as he stayed one step ahead of the Nazis. The fact is that others fared worse than he did, but did better in the end. What he was was an embittered Leftist, who was so convinced of everyone else's stupidity (and, when it came to brains, he was right about the others, I guess) that he became dysfunctional.

Those are family anecdotes, but you can learn a lot too by looking at our brilliant Democratic presidents and our less brilliant Republican ones. Jimmy Carter, the brilliant engineer, was quite possibly the most wishy-washy man ever to hold the office. An engineer friend of mine explained that Carter made calculations. He assembled data and reached a conclusion. Add in new data and he'd arrive at a new conclusion. My friend's analysis was right as far as it went -- that was how Carter thought -- but it missed the scary corollary: Carter had no fixed principles. He lived in a moral vacuum in which everything was a factual problem that could be solve by manipulating integers.

The arguably less intelligent Reagan might not have had the world's greatest head for details, but that left him a lot of space for large thoughts about abstract values. He cherished freedom and therefore didn't get bogged down in the real politik that was de rigeur in Washington when he took office. He knew that the Soviet Union was an evil institution and was able to keep his eye on that ball. Likewise, he figured out that governments don't make money, they just spend money. People make money. This was intuitively correct and was backed up by the collapse of socialist economic systems. He didn't need experts to spell out in stifling academic details an opposite principle that could not possibly be true.

Clinton too had a Carter-esque habit of getting bogged down in inessential details. Even the loving press noted how people often dreaded going into meetings with him because he was unable to stay focused. His overweening sense of his intelligence also blocked his moral compass. Clinton felt that he was too smart for the petty rules confining ordinary people. (Same for Mrs. Clinton.) Smart and narcissistic, they both did precisely what they wanted because they refused to believe that mere mortals could catch up with them. When mere mortals did catch up, rather than being repentant, they were actually offended that ordinary people would come after them.

I believe that precisely the same pattern is emerging here. I'll concede that Obama is a smart guy, with a good word sense. (Especially if the word is "uh, uh, uh," which pops up a lot in his extemporaneous speaking.) However, he's already shown over and over again that, in common with people who believe that they're smarter than the average bear, he's guilty of terrible and dangerous hubris. He's also incapable of learning from his mistakes because, in his own mind, he's too smart to make mistakes. Anything that goes wrong is the other guy's fault. I think this accounts for the ponderous, inept, back-firing attacks that he's aiming at Palin.

In contrast, Palin and McCain may not be the greatest intellectual lights in the world, but that's probably a good thing. They speak clearly. They embrace simple, intuitive ideas. They are able to view the big picture without getting bogged down in details. And they're very, very clear on larger values and morals issues. Because they're not getting tangled in petty sidelines of thought, they don't see moral questions as being above their pay grade. Their answers ultimately may not be right, but at least they have them.

I hope you don't take this post as an attack on intellectuals, academics and smart people generally. I think smart people are wonderful and delightful. I know many who are almost obscenely functional and who have utterly admirable values. It's just that I think that the Democrats' obsessive focus on smarts leads them to a form of arrogance that blocks situational awareness, that makes them extremely arrogant and that, in extreme cases, enables them to substitute values free analysis for fixed moral principles.