How many times have I said this, people?

Long-time readers of this blog know that I hold the cult of IQ/education in contempt. But for whatever reason, part of the population believes that if you put a philosopher king or queen in charge--you know, someone with a high IQ, mental and verbal acuity, and advanced degrees from institutions with ivy-covered walls--and if you surround him or her with philosopher princes and princesses, he or she will govern effectively. For years I've rejected this belief, primarily because it's inconsistent with the historical record.

Well, comes now Barack Obama, paraphrased by Ron Suskind, who has written a book about the dysfunctional Obama White House: "The president at that point was expressing his distaste for what he felt dominated his first two years, which was, as he said, a kind of technocratic approach, that if you get the right people in the room and they have sufficiently high IQs or enough sterling degrees, you are going to get answers, solutions to problems that are wide, vast, and complex. And I think the two years that have passed convinced him that maybe that’s not the case."

And then there's this: "Yes there were problems, yes it was difficult, yes it was very frustrating for the president to feel trapped in a kind of rolling debate society that was largely run by Larry Summers and others, and I think he felt he didn’t have nearly enough to show for it, and he was exhausted by it. And feeling that maybe his best and highest use as president, as a leader, was to focus on these other issues more broadly, about making the American people feel confident."

The takeaway for me is that we ought to elect people who have governed successfully, or who have managed a large enterprise successfully (generals and CEOs come to mind), regardless of IQ, facility with the language, or prestigious degrees...you know, people who will NOT be learning basic lessons about executive-level management during their first term as president.

Footnote: I've been doing a little reading about George W. Bush lately. I'm going to offer a provocative statement to those of you who still believe that W is "incurious" and/or stupid: Unless you're an academic historian, W knows vastly more about U.S. and world political history than you do (and than I do, by the way), and knows it not from the experience of being president, but from reading books that you have not read, and in many cases have not even heard of.

Comments

[international hostel]

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[twitter.com/hardaway]

Right. His wife was a librarian, remember.