Late last week, at a White House press conference, a reporter asked the president to respond to an inconvenient reality: the war in Iraq has made al Qaeda stronger and make counter-terrorism efforts more difficult. Bush offered a long, meandering answer that was largely incoherent, made very little sense, and avoided the subject altogether.
I argued that Bush’s response was “dangerously dumb,” and had the sophistication of “having a foreign policy argument with a six-year-old.”
In response, James Joyner, a conservative whose intellect I respect, suggested that I was confused.
The problem here is confusing verbal skill and intelligence. It’s probably true that most people who are glib and able to think quickly on their feet are bright. Plenty of highly intelligent people, though, lack that facility.
That Bush has above average IQ is well documented. His SAT score of 1206 put him well above the 90th percentile and ahead of his 2004 rival John Kerry (although behind 2000 opponent Al Gore). He graduated from Yale. Made it through flight school. Got his MBA from Harvard. Has a legendary memory for personal details and baseball stats. He’s not, by any means, a dumb guy.
What he seems to lack is a strong intellectual curiosity. He lacks both a wonk’s passion for policy details and an ideologue’s passion for debating ideas. He’s also too resistant, for my taste anyway, to ideas that challenge his preconceptions.
I’m hesitant to delve too deeply into a discussion on the president’s intellectual prowess — the debate is already well-tread and I suspect every American has already come to his or her own conclusion about whether Bush is a smart man (or, at least, smart enough to be a capable president).
That said, and at the risk of appearing overly sensitive, I thought I’d take a moment to consider Joyner’s argument in more detail.
Joyner concedes that Bush’s rhetorical skills are lacking, but believes intelligent people can be awful public speakers. I absolutely agree. My “dangerously dumb” comment, however, wasn’t directed at the president’s frequent trouble with subject-verb agreement, but rather the substance of his explanation. He was asked about his policies’ beneficial impact on al Qaeda, a subject with which he should be familiar. Bush had nothing to offer — he even questioned the priorities of the reporter who dared to ask the question in the first place.
In truth, there probably is some kind of coherent conservative response to the question. Indeed, I suspect Joyner himself could have come up with something relatively persuasive if asked. But the point is that the president can’t even defend his own ideas — his press conferences are a series of sound-bites and errors of fact. His comments reflect a man who appears to have no idea what he’s doing.
More specifically, Joyner touts Bush’s IQ and SAT scores. Sidestepping, for a moment, the validity of these tests, IQ and SAT scores tend to measure (or, at least, are intended to measure) a person’s capacity for learning. There’s no evidence, however, that Bush has ever tried to better himself intellectually. He doesn’t read, he didn’t care for school, and to this day, he openly mocks the well-educated, probably as a defense mechanism for his own limitations. Bush received an Ivy-League education, but by all appearances, he barely got by, and was only able to succeed because of his family name.
By pointing to the results of tests usually given to children and teenagers, Joyner practically proves my point for me. Indeed, Joyner himself describes the president as lacking “intellectual curiosity,” disregarding details, and showing a resistance to ideas. I agree wholeheartedly.
But the resulting picture hardly works in the president’s favor. We’re left with a man who doesn’t appear to be smart, doesn’t care about being smart, doesn’t impress anyone as being smart, does not make smart decisions, and generally shows disdain for those who he considers smart.
Does this make the president “dangerously dumb”? The Carpetbagger reports, you decide.