Poll inspired by this baffling quote:
[QUOTE=Fotheringay-Phipps]
(If anything, I think being brilliant might be more of a negative in a president than a positive, FWIW.)
[/QUOTE]
“Mr. Shine! Him diamond!”
There’s an image of brilliance as the Absent-Minded Professor type, or someone who can focus on one problem for decades and understand it to the most fundamental detail, like finding a single gene that increases the likelihood of one type of cancer. That approach wouldn’t work for a nationally elected leader.
But I don’t think that’s the only type of brilliance, so I voted yes.
Could you please post the context to the quote in the OP?
The full exchange is in this post.
I don’t think context makes it any less baffling.
All else being equal, smarter is obviously better than dumber. But all else is not always equal. IME brilliant people are more apt to go off the deep end, in that they’re used to being smarter than everyone else and thinking outside the box.
Brilliant people are good as idea people. But the Prez is more of an adminstrative job. You need the ideas from staffers and policy wonks, whether inside or outside the administration. From the chief executive, you need final determination of which idea is best, along with the administrative ability to carry it out.
In sum, you do not want a president who is so carried away with his brilliant and ingenuous ideas that he goes for them even when impractical or otherwise wrongheaded. You want someone who can recognize good ideas and carry them out, but can also reject wrongheaded ones, no matter how clever.
The classic example of this is the 1952 and 1956 Eisenhower-Stevenson campaigns.
Adlai Stevenson was by all accounts a brilliant, thoughtful man, with a great sense of humor to boot. He was also known, during his time as the governor of Illinois, to be one of the most indecisive people ever to hold office. There was never an issue on which Stevenson couldn’t see both sides, as well as a few sides that no one was advocating.
By contrast, Eisenhower wasn’t known for his intellectual skills, but he had just finished commanding the army that liberated Europe.
Adlai never had a chance.
I don’t think you have to be “brilliant” to be a good leader. You do need to be intelligent, open-minded, well-educated, and able to make a decision based on reality and the good of the country, not some political fantasy or idealism. Maybe one day we’ll get to vote for someone like that.
OK, that was cynical. So sue me.
I’d like to have my highest ranking elected official be the man that “brilliant” people turn to with their problems/concerns.
There’s 300 million people in this country. We should be able to get a bunch brilliant candidates together, and then choose one who won’t go off the deep end, be consumed by his own brilliance, or be a terrible leader for other reasons.
In other words, “brilliant” and “good leader” are not mutually exclusive. Every election cycle we SHOULD be choosing between two candidates who have both qualities. The fact that our political process allows people who aren’t brilliant, or who aren’t good leaders, anywhere near the office of the presidency is embarrassing. Both of those things should be mandatory prerequisites.
I can’t imagine ever saying “she’s too good of a leader to be president.” Likewise, I can’t imagine ever saying “she’s too brilliant to be president.”
I would prefer practical, resonable and a common sense thinker over brilliant for a leader.
However they should surround themselves with brilliance.
Obviously not mutually exclusive. But being brilliant has a downside.
Conversely, I’m not seeing the big advantage of having the president be brilliant. There are lots of brilliant people around. Let them come up with the ingenuous ideas. How much is added by having the president himself be the brilliant one.
I mean, if the brilliant ideas are so brilliant that no one can even understand them or appreciate their brilliance other than the guy who thought them up, then there’s no way they will get public or political support anyway. And if others can understand and appreciate them, then why would it be advantagous for the president to be the guy who think them up?
True brilliance is coming up with novel ideas that the public can understand, but no one thought of before, and then rallying broad support to enact them.
Exactly.
Which is why there’s not this big advantage for the president to himself be brilliant.
Assuming he’s at least as smart as the public, all he has to do is have brilliant advisors, or access to brilliant people in other areas (think tanks, columnists, scholars etc.), and then rally broad support to enact their ideas.
Richard Feynman says in one of his books that one thing that impressed him about military people was their ability to make decisions quickly when necessary.
The question is too vague. Do I consider it important that the President be a brilliant physicist, or a brilliant mathematician, or a brilliant novelist? Not at all. But I do consider it important that he be a brilliant manager, a brilliant negotiator, and a brilliant organizer. And part of those skills is recognizing the need, and being able to find, people who exhibit brilliance in other areas to delegate responsibilities to.
I don’t think the role of the president, or even the office of the president, is to “come up with new ideas.” Like you say, it’s an administrative position. As far as administrative positions go, though, it’s far and away the most mind boggling. The president is the head of a massive number of departments. His staff is huge, plus he has to deal with congress, lobbyists, the courts, the media, and joe sixpack. The amount of information for a single person to receive, digest, process, and act upon is beyond comprehension. And that is why the president needs to be brilliant.
I suppose you could look at the office like Bush did, where he’s presented option A and option B and all he has to do is be the decider. But I think that’s moronic and simplistic. In reality he’s got about 10,000 different “options” all swirling about, and he needs to prioritize, eliminate redundancy, manage project lifecycles, determine feasibility, etc. The pace at which he needs to accomplish these tasks is unparalleled. If you don’t think managing at that level of complexity requires brilliance, we’re on different planets.
OK, we’re on different planets. The job of the staff is to sift through most of this.
Jimmy Carter tried to be on top of everything, and this was widely considered to be one of his failures.
I was thinking of the type of brilliance that I assumed Bricker was attributing to Obama (& which the school grades might have been relevant to).
Someone has to pick the brilliant advisors. They have to understand the pluses and minuses of various options, and decide which way to go. This is sort of like the “I can be a CEO” thought process that is equally wrong.
Ideally, you want your top guy to be every bit as smart as his advisors, so it’s a conversation of peers, and not the dopey sales guy having the tech guy talking over his head. An insightful executive will understand the important points of your project, and won’t let you gloss over the downside. He’ll ask relevant, pointed questions and push his advisors to excellence, LEAD them, not just follow their recommendations.
That’s true. But you don’t have to be brilliant to do those things.
It’s not wrong because you need to be brilliant to be a CEO. It’s wrong because there are other qualities that are required to be a CEO (mostly leadership, organizational, and decision-making). Obviously a certain amount of intelligence is required as well. But it’s well short of brilliance.
Again, you don’t need to be brilliant for any of this. And it would be a “conversation of peers” in any event, because the top guy would have other areas in which he would be ahead of the brilliant guy. (Plus, being the top guy has a gravitas of its own.)