Since I’ve seen this asserted by conservatives on this very board, I was wondering how widespread this belief is. I was also wondering as to its potential effect. There are certainly lots of liberals who thought/think GWB was both lazy and not that bright (to say the least), but I don’t recall anyone from John Kerry or Al Gore’s campaign outright saying it that bluntly. Do they really think the President got to where he is through pure affirmative action, or are they just playing to a particular portion of their base?
I don’t think he’s “not that bright”, but I think he’s a lot less intelligent than many of his supporters believe.
What we saw last night is that Obama can memorize his lines well, he can speak in complete sentences, but he can’t respond to any questions or rebuttals that he hasn’t been prepared for ahead of time by his coaches. In other words, he’s probably at the median intelligence-wise for a politician.
Yeah, of all the ham-handed ways to criticize President Obama, saying he’s lazy and stupid are about the ham-handiest. Say what you want about a post-racial society, words still do have a history. This is about one step away from saying he should just stick to playing basketball.
It’s a bizarre charge. Obama’s weakness is that he can be too intellectual and come off as nerdish. Sununu would have been better off accusing Obama of being an ivory-tower egghead.
As for the appeal to racism, that’s just stupid. The Republicans have every reason to stay quiet on race. They’ve already got the racist vote locked up - the people that won’t vote for a black guy know who the black candidate is. But by pointing it out, the Republicans risk an anti-racist backlash of people voting for Obama to distance themselves from accusations of racism.
As long as W. is the yardstick of Presidential brilliance and intelligence, I’m going to be comfortable with any drooling, gibbering idiot put forth as his clear superior.
Oh no! A egocentric bigot thinks the Black Guy (quick Cletus, hide your wimmenfolk) who was President of the Harvard Law Review isn’t very smart. We’re doomed.
As someone who voted for Obama in 2008 and thinks he has been an overall huge disappointment as President (but will be reluctantly voting for him again, as Mitt Romney would be a disaster of epic proportions for America) I don’t think it’s fair to call Barack Obama either “lazy” or “not that bright” but I would say that words like smug and arrogant seem pretty accurate to me…
Of course Obama’s level of arrogance, (which is obviously something 99% of all politicians have to some degree) is not even in the same stratosphere as Romney’s is; Mitt Romney may currently be the singlemost self-satisfied, completely out-of-touch, aloof, smarmy jackass in all of big-time American politics now that John Edwards has retired.
I’ll go along with ‘smarmy,’ ‘self-satisfied,’ and ‘jackass,’ but he’s hardly aloof (in fact, had quite the opposite problem), and despite the smarminess, he seemed to have a pretty good read on the difficulties faced by Americans who were in far less pleasant straits than he was. So he wasn’t exactly out of touch.
IOW, Romney completely outdoes Edwards in this department. I fully expect pond scum to join together for a brief moment of sentience just to say that comparing Romney with them is an unfair slam on them.
This dovetails neatly with my theory, which is that post-Reagan pseudo-conservative Tea-Party-loving Republicans tend to follow the Rovian strategy of “accuse your opponent of your own greatest weaknesses”.
Since Mitt Romney couldn’t generate a new thought if you wound his key to the stops…
Obama is far from stupid. His problem is a deeply ingrained socialist (small “s”) ideology. He cannot entertain that a good solution to a problem exists that falls outside his word view.