# American's are too dumb for an Obama presidency. **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [December 8, 2008, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295 "2008-12-08T20:02:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/21 "2008-12-08T22:20:21Z")
Seriously. Where in the hell did that apostrophe come from? What the hell is wrong with the OP? What was she thinking? Is our children learning? ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/22 "2008-12-08T22:21:40Z")
> [@Biggirl](#): > > Seriously. Where in the hell did that apostrophe come from? What the hell is wrong with the OP? What was she thinking? Is our children learning? A ‘D’ in English? That’s unpossible! ---
**Author:** ![Lobsang](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobsang/32/4067_2.png) [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/23 "2008-12-08T22:23:32Z")
It came from your keyboard, bad keyboard. ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/24 "2008-12-08T22:36:42Z")
I’ve seen articles like this: [Obama’s appointments not liberal enough](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/us/politics/09obama.html?ref=politics) Maybe for once we have a president that won’t be surrounding himself with his conservative or liberal buddies but rather finding the person best fit for the job. Maybe for once we have a president who’s goal it is to not push a liberal or conservative agenda but an agenda of doing what’s best for the country parties be damned. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/25 "2008-12-08T22:43:26Z")
Go 'way! I’m ‘batin’! -Smeghead, current Ivy League PhD student ---
**Author:** ![UncleBeer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/977dab/32.png) [@UncleBeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleBeer)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/26 "2008-12-08T22:46:15Z")
The biggest fault with the original post isn’t the punctuation, it’s the narrow timeframe selected. The “norm” almost certainly does not mean only the 8 years of Dubya’s administration. The “norm” is drawn from a much longer span of time. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Moto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de0a6/32.png) [@Mr.Moto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Moto)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/27 "2008-12-08T22:46:48Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > Meh. I went to Mediocre Regional State U, _by choice_, and there were plenty of brilliant people there - but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather have gone to Yale or Princeton, all things being equal. Well, I would have liked to go there as well - but not all of us can. I could have attended a far more selective school than Pitt - but these were more expensive and that was a consideration. It is today as well for most of these schools. > [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > Personally, I’d prefer that my world leaders go to Oxford, MIT, the Sorbonne, etc. than Good Football Okay Academics College. Well, what about the Naval Academy? Or Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College? Or Kansas City Law School? Look, I don’t think this is terribly important - but it is revealing in a way. And while too much can be made of this, there might be a problem here both in perception and in the quality of advice President Obama might get from this crowd. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/28 "2008-12-08T22:51:19Z")
I recall the wife of an old Air Force buddy of my Dad – they live in Denver – on a visit to Florida one time, complaining about the “Ivy League Mafia” – smartass dogooders proclaiming _de haut en bas_ (not her words, of course), “We’re here to help you!” Yes, it’s a very ignorant outlook – we’re talking here about the **good** kind of “elitism” – but not so much so as to be entirely dismissed out of hand; elitism as such always has certain odious characteristics that can’t be washed away, and the non-elite will never miss the scent. At any rate, it’s an outlook millions of Americans share. ---
**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/29 "2008-12-08T22:53:31Z")
> [@UncleBeer](#): > > The biggest fault with the original post isn’t the punctuation, it’s the narrow timeframe selected. The “norm” almost certainly does not mean only the 8 years of Dubya’s administration. The “norm” is drawn from a much longer span of time. You know, I was going to point out that the article first talks about ‘the norm’ and then goes on to talk about how Clinton had “intellectuals” in his cabinet. As did FDR and JFK (apparently, Republican presidents get all their picks from Special Olympics Medal winners), so the ‘norm’ Mr. MacGillis is talking about is the norm for the last 8 years. If I were a conservative, I’d want to punch Mr. MacGillis right through his non-thinking cap. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/30 "2008-12-08T23:02:48Z")
As you can read in [_Before the Storm_](http://www.amazon.com/Before-Storm-Goldwater-Unmaking-Consensus/dp/1568584121/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228777122&sr=8-2) and [_Nixonland,_](http://www.amazon.com/Nixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America/dp/0743243021/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b) both by Rick Perlstein, it was part of the “liberal consensus” of the 1940s and 1950s that government and administration **should** be in the hands of educated Ivy-League experts, and that was one of the things the conservatives who backed Goldwater in 1964 and Nixon in 1968 were rebelling against. Their perception, right or wrong, was that those WASP\* elitists (few non-WASPs attended Ivy League schools in those days) were necessarily indoctrinated by their educational institutions in a liberalism scarcely distinguishable from Communism. \*And I’m using WASP in a class-specific sense. As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “George Wallace might have been a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon descent, and rather vocal on all three points, but a WASP he was not.” ---
**Author:** ![whole\_bean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/96bed5/32.png) [@whole\_bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whole_bean)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/31 "2008-12-08T23:03:34Z")
> [@Mr.Moto](#): > > the Naval Academy? Or Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College? Or Kansas City Law School? one of these things is not like the other ---
**Author:** ![Lobsang](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobsang/32/4067_2.png) [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/32 "2008-12-08T23:05:38Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > Go 'way! I’m ‘batin’! > > -Smeghead, current Ivy League PhD student Are you learning to become a Legal type guy, so you can ask for those court thingies? ---
**Author:** ![UncleBeer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/977dab/32.png) [@UncleBeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleBeer)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/33 "2008-12-08T23:05:51Z")
> [@Biggirl](#): > > . . . talk about how Clinton had “intellectuals” in his cabinet. You mean this part: > [@](#): > > And while some Obama nominees started out under Clinton, the former president also filled his team with less-credentialed Arkansas associates, such as Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, Webster L. Hubbell, Vincent W. Foster Jr. and Bruce Lindsey. And the remarks about JFK’s Camelot are equivocal at best. > [@](#): > > . . . President John F. Kennedy’s “best and brightest” led the country into the Vietnam War. And botched that miserably. The conclusion to be drawn is that insularity - no matter whether the source is Ivy League schools, or or one’s own idiot acquaintances - probably isn’t a good thing for a nation with problems as diverse as ours currently seem to be. ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/34 "2008-12-08T23:13:16Z")
> [@UncleBeer](#): > > The conclusion to be drawn is that insularity - no matter whether the source is Ivy League schools, or or one’s own idiot acquaintances - probably isn’t a good thing for a nation with problems as diverse as ours currently seem to be. While that is true, the author of the article made a poor case for this. It’s one thing to leave the hallowed halls of Harvard or Yale to take a political appointment. Most of Obama’s appointments seem to come with real world experience, as is the case with his picks for Secretary of Defense and National Security Adviser. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/35 "2008-12-08T23:14:01Z")
> [@UncleBeer](#): > > The conclusion to be drawn is that insularity - no matter whether the source is Ivy League schools, or or one’s own idiot acquaintances - probably isn’t a good thing for a nation with problems as diverse as ours currently seem to be. Quite true. Nevertheless, _ceteris paribus,_ the POTUS is **much** likelier to get good advice from Ivy League grads than from grads of the Naval Academy, Southwest Texas State Teachers College, or Kansas City Law School. ---
**Author:** ![Bosstone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/22d042/32.png) [@Bosstone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosstone)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/36 "2008-12-08T23:41:05Z")
Obama’s cabinet picks clearly aren’t that smart. He has yet to tap Colbert for anything. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/37 "2008-12-08T23:47:37Z")
> [@Bosstone](#): > > Obama’s cabinet picks clearly aren’t that smart. He has yet to tap Colbert for anything. I doubt St. Stephen swings that way. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bcef8e/32.png) [@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/38 "2008-12-08T23:48:32Z")
> [@Bosstone](#): > > Obama’s cabinet picks clearly aren’t that smart. He has yet to tap Colbert for anything. Seriously. And the guy was almost president. ---
**Author:** ![hawksgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ed655f/32.png) [@hawksgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hawksgirl)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/39 "2008-12-08T23:53:05Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > I doubt St. Stephen swings that way. 😉 I bet he would for a Cabinet post. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2008, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295/40 "2008-12-08T23:59:51Z")
I’m quite irked by the generally anti-intellectual attitude which assumes that people who are in academia, or related to academia, are automatically somehow unable to actually think about, or care about, real issues relating to real people. Here’s an exchange I had with **Liberal** about this topic a few years ago: > [@me](#): > > > [@Liberal](#): > > > > I’m not at all sure whether intelligence is any more important than character. I’d sooner trust the vote of a simple-minded old man from Harlem who lived his life in the service of his family, friends, and neighbors than the vote of a genius jackass from Harvard who wants to tell me how to run my life. > > Isn’t that a bit of a false dichotomy, though? I mean, not that I’m in any way endorsing the OP’s plan, but what if your choices are a simple-minded old man from Harlem who lived his life in the service of his family, friends and neighbors, and a genius Harvard professor who spent his entire professional life studying political science, sociology and/or economics, and who is a truly ethical, goodhearted, decent human being who loves his family, gives back to his community, and has devoted his life to figuring out how to improve society? > I’m quite leery of the anti-intellectual tendencies which tell us that simple homsepun folk wisdom are the answers to all of life’s problems. What does the simple-minded man from Harlem think about NAFTA? Does he know whether Global Warming is real? How does he feel about ethanol subsidies and alternative fuel research? How much did he know about Al Qaeda before 9/11? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-are-too-dumb-for-an-obama-presidency/476295.md?page=3)