Politico asks, “Is Newt as smart as he thinks?” I liked Fred Siegel’s response the best:
“The intellectual level of debate in the Senate and the House is very low, and it’s in that context that Gingrich comes off as more profound than he really is,” Siegel said. “He is the tallest building in Wichita.”
A friend expresses this same idea differently, as “the best hockey player in Ecuador.” I’m sure there’s a whole raft of such comparisons, similar to “the world’s shortest book” genre (Italian War Heroes, for instance — it’s a joke!).
But seriously, how important is IQ to the success of a president? The Politico piece points out that, if elected, Gingrich would be only the second president with a Ph.D. But the first one was Wilson, which tells you a lot. I’m sure people have examined this more rigorously, but my sense is that our smartest presidents were probably J. Q. Adams, Wilson, and Hoover; none of them was terribly good at the job (though Adams and Hoover made great contributions in other capacities), suggesting that there might be such a thing as being too smart to be president. I leave the reader to decide whether this applies to our current chief executive, who tells people that he knows more about policy than his policy directors and is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters.
On the other hand, it could be that there’s an IQ threshold below which one is simply unsuited for the job, and one above which intelligence is no longer as relevant as other characteristics. I suspect this is the case for most of life’s activities, but if someone has something substantive to add, I’d love to read it in the comments.
Newt Gingrich is a history major like me.
History majors can give you historical context and are filled with knowledge of the past.
Smart? Sure.
Exceptional? Not really.
I'd take Romney's business and law degree over Newt's.
After all, I've seen for myself just how much employers value BA degrees.
Which is to say not much....not much at all....good thing I had years of work experience before I went to college...or I'd be screwed, blued and tattooed but still sound intelligent just like Newt...
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse1. Newt doesn't just have a BA, he has one from Emory. And on top of that he has a PhD from Tulane.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse2. BA degrees from the 60s and 70s were a much bigger deal than BA degrees from the mid-80s onward. See Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" for an excellent explanation of why. BA degrees may be watered down nowadays, but they used to require intelligence and work to obtain.
Teddy Roosevelt I imagine also had an extremely high IQ, and while you may not agree with his policies, he probably has to be viewed as being a very effective president.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse...but my sense is that our smartest presidents were probably J. Q. Adams, Wilson, and Hoover"
Smartest, or most educated? Isn't there a difference?
Reading through the collective works of Lincoln, it's tough to discount the intellect at work there. I don't believe Teddy Roosevelt had any advanced degrees (law school dropout,maybe?), but if you read his autobiography, his command of history and a variety of other subjects is well-documented.
And, while Eisenhower didn't have a PhD, he did attend most (if not all) of the staff war colleges. And like Teddy, his autobiography stands as one of the finest presidential autobiographies ever written.
All three of these men were pretty bright, and all three had pretty (relatively) successful presidencies.
OTOH, Jimmy Carter was literally a nuclear engineer, and we all know how that turned out.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe qualities needed to temper intellect are common sense and humility. Reagan had a boatload of both; Obama shows himself to have little of either.
Thus 'smart' seems the wrong word to describe the essential qualities of a successful president.
(In TR's day, those aspiring to a legal career 'read' law as, in effect, an apprentice, but I'm not familiar with his education or experience.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The qualities needed to temper intellect are common sense and humility. "
I agree with that entirely. I would add though, that while Reagan is so flippantly dismissed by the left as a "lightweight", I don't think you can reach that conclusion with a fair reading of the book, "Reagan, In his own hand".
That book highlights that Reagan was a lot of things, not least of which was a thinker. It's clear that he closely examined the hot topics of the day, and reflected upon them at great length. That book also, I believe, put to bed the notion that Reagan was only a "big picture" guy. He wasn't. It may be true that he used that characterization as a shield or foil to nosy reporters, but I don't think that there was much - if anything - that passed Reagan by.
Another commenter earlier this week posted a video of Reagan in a 1967 town hall/quiz bowl debate with Bobby Kennedy - a man who the left reveres as someone with a towering intellect. It's clear from that video, and the transcript of the entire debate, that not only did Reagan more than hold his own again Bobby Kennedy, but Reagan won.
Most people also don't realize that Reagan obtained a degree in economics. Stupid people don't get degrees in economics, Paul Krugman notwithstanding.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEvery time someone mentions Reagan as stupid, a dunce, a lightweight, I know that they have never read "In His Own Words."
Reagan was far smarter than most anyone ever gave him credit for. Even better-- he was *wise*.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJohn Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover?? I think not. If IQ is the consideration, then few Presidents top Jefferson, Lincoln and T. Roosevelt. Educational accomplishment is something else again and (after the experience of the current occupant of the White House), not to be taken seriously as a qualification for the office.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJefferson was another who must have been off the charts in terms of IQ but wasn't that successful a President. The stupidest was probably Andrew Johnson, and one gets the impression that he at least would have done better with a little more horsepower. Other notably smart ones were Taft, Garfield and Coolidge -- all quite good Presidents.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusethomas jefferson (please!)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI've been thinking about this too. First let us set aside what the MSM likes to tell us, that Democrats are brilliant and all Republicans cretins.
Obviously there is some minimum IQ required to be president, but I'd say almost anyone who was capable of running would be capable of doing the job, intellectual-wise.
I've actually come to think that being a good POLITICIAN is the important thing. I give you Bill Clinton, for a good example. Clearly very smart (a Rhodes Scholar!) and reported to have a photographic memory, but it isn't for his brain power that we think he was an effective president (and I think in fairness we all must admit he was, and the public certainly thought so). It was because of his great gift for pure politics.
But is that not what the President's job really is? To marshal people and persuade people, to get them to work together, to work out disputes between groups, countries, individuals?
A President isn't supposed to figure everything out himself, who on earth could be that smart? But he is supposed to LEAD and that requires an ace pol.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePerhaps not a terribly original view, but wouldn't one have to consider Washington and Lincoln as pretty smart. And um, Jefferson? What's the old joke: {insert names} are the two smartest people in one room since Jefferson dined alone?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe line is Kennedy's. At a dinner of Nobel laureates, he said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. "
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think it was Jonah who gave us: "best Octoberfest in Miami", still one of my faves
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMaybe you should write something substantive.
You have problems with Newt and the red card. Fine. But a lot of Americans wouldn't. Doesn't mean you need to insult him. Especially since I really don't think you are smarter than he is. There are a lot of people on this site who think they are the smartest guy in the room. Surprised you can all go on a cruise together, and not have the ship rise right out of the water.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy suspicion is that the president need only be bright and not brilliant, putting the "qualified" IQ range somewhere in the 105 - 130 range (just a wild stab at it). Most people probably would seem to prefer someone closer to 120 than not, I would guess. Generally, I think you want someone smarter than the average bear, but not suffering from the narrow aptitudes that often accompany genius.
More important than IQ, I think, is how the person views the importance of IQ or expertise in a variety of life domains. If they're like Gingrich, then they think that the smartest and most expert are the most qualified to make every decision about how our society is to be ordered (that coupled with his immoral philanderings is why I won't be voting for Gingrich if he's still on the ballot when it comes to Texas). Part of the appeal of Perry, Bachmann, and Cain is that they don't condescend in this way, and seem more willing to let individuals order their own lives and allow society to organize itself more organically (obviously, we could find nits, but I'm painting with a broad brush).
Even better would be someone like Paul Ryan who is probably on the high end of bright (and probably also not brilliant), is a thoroughgoing expert on the relevant policy questions, and yet still firmly and consistently believes in a self-ordering society.
I'll be voting for Perry this time around, and hoping for Ryan in 2020.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYeah, I think you're conflating IQ/intelligence and educated, when there isn't necessarily a correlation. This is the whole point we commenters have been making when the left comes in here and accuses us of being anti-intellectual. And it all goes back to the old axiom, that it's not that our liberal friends don't know anything, but that so much of what they know, just isn't so. That can also be applied to a large percentage of otherwise supposidly learned and educated people.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes, as people are pointing out: Brains per se and education are not the same thing at all, at all.
Variable innate intelligence is obviously a real phenomenon, even if whether IQ measures exactly that is a whole other debate. (But it does seem to measure something.) I read somewhere -- forget where, alas -- that if one were allowed to set one's own IQ, about 120-130 is the place to be. Which is to say, smart enough that lack of intelligence is unlikely to ever be a barrier, but not so smart that you seem weird (or perhaps become weird).
But for all that, intelligence is just potential. It doesn't have any moral weight; in itself, it means very little.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOne should be able to justifiably argue that at least back in the day, "educated" was far more synonymous with intelligence than it is today. Princeton and UVA in Wilson's day weren't exactly diploma mills, and the classical educations of the Founders & Framers would make most grad students of today weep tears in a corner.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA large part of the reason for that is that classical education was often self-learned. Especially in the days of the founders, there weren't public schools to mediocratize and force-feed learning to the masses - if you wanted to learn (and wanting to learn is a good indicator of real intelligence), then you found the information where you could and learned it as well as you could. That becomes self-selecting for intelligence, then - and for getting into institutes of higher learning.
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