You mean like welfare reform or a balanced budget?
the majority of people don’t like brainy people so the brainy would have to hide it and be “charming”.
Bill Clinton gave us “It depends on what your definition of is is.”
i had to look it up. there were 2. the second was “as is” but i quess if someone is a big enough ass he can find more definitions of is.
maybe you must also be a good liar to qualify as a politician.
Dal Timgar
December wrote truly:
“Getting back to the OP, this example shows that to a considerable degree, “smart” is in the eyes of the beholder.”
Without intending to hint to any direction, exept the voters all over the world, I would say that even more truly is:
"Smart" is in the brains of the beholder.
Sailor made the operative point. I know several people with genius or near genius level intellects (if we’re talking about IQ) who I wouldn’t trust to organize an Easter egg roll .
The set of extremely intelligent people and the set of competent and effective leaders are often mutually exclusive. You might even argue on some levels that being very bright would make you a less competent leader, as your ability to empathize and resonate emotionally with those whom you need to inspire and lead would be less effective than someone closer to the middle of the bell curve.
So much for Plato’s ideal of the state run by a “philosopher-king.”
Or its modern updated version, Jor-El’s planet Krypton which was governed by the “Science Council.”
Well, I’d like to see the evidence that those who run for office and get elected are any less “truly gifted” than those, for example, who teach at universities or run businesses.
I’d like to see a plot of past world leaders, how well remembered they are as being great, and their intelligence.
I’m willing to bet that intelligence doesn’t correlate particularly well as a characteristic of effective government officials.
It’s been mentioned that Nixon, Carter and Clinton were probably the three smartest presidents elected in the last 50 years. Brian Mulroney in Canada was very smart. Churchill was brilliant, and he was also a laughingstock in government until WWII presented his opportunity for greatness - and he was promptly booted out by the electorate after the war was over.
I can think of lots of other characteristics as important as intelligence. Ability to delegate, ability to inspire confidence, ability to persuade people, grace under pressure. And some of these are correlated negatively with intelligence.
You know, I always thought the idea of the planet being governed by a “Science Council” was a cool idea. Why hasn’t it ever been tried? Even if not the planet, a single country?
To work, it would probably require a more advanced race than the current Homo sap.
It would require more advanced scientists, too. Having been around scientists a lot, I wouldn’t want them organizing a shopping trip for me.
Scientists are a special breed of cat. They are supremely focused on highly technical minutae. They are generally not the kind of people you’d want running a country.
I’m still reading; I just don’t have much to contribute. Some good points are being made. Thank you.
Interestingly, this was a running theme last season on The West Wing. Martin Sheen’s character, President Bartlet, is running for reelection. We, the audience, know him to be a brilliant man (he has won the Nobel Prize for Economics, but more importantly, we see him act brilliantly on a weekly basis). His opponent (played by James Brolin) is not a brilliant man. There is a debate within the Bartlet campaign as to whether he should “dumb down” in order to appeal to the voters. There are references to the general dislike the American people have for those who are smarter than they are.
The President is not supposed to be above the people, he is supposed to be one of them. Theoretically, we rule ourselves. To choose the smartest person to be President implies that the rest of us don’t have the brains to rule.
The main reasons we don’t have the smartest person as President have already been stated:
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The President gets his job by being elected, and people don’t vote for brains.
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Historically, there has not been a correlation between brains and an effective Presidency.
Intelligence and wisdom only increase the ability to use great power, they do not necessitate that it will be used. I think you pretty much have to be dumb to do that; just my opinion though =P Fight fire with fire!
-Justhink
::Yawn::
And the profession of George Dubya Bush’s father, George Bush was…?
Look up “causality”.
What percentage of American presidents were sons of American presidents?
Of those who were, can you please prove the reason they became presidents is because they were sons of presidents?
Now please do the same with Arab rulers.
What is the result? I bet it is higher in the Arab world. By a lot.
::yawn::
“Arab” rulers - by which I assume you are referring to mainly lower Gulf Sheikhs - aren’t democratically-elected presidents.
This thread is not about “Arab” rulers.
It is about intelligence and American presidents. As I pointed out - nepotism, (either direct father-son, or family connections) is one reason why US presidents aren’t necessarily the smartest people.
If you want to hijack the discussion into one about “Arab” rulers, then please open a new thread.
You need more than a million dollars, you need several million,
it’s expensive to launch any campaign, whether you win or not.
I should know I work for a printing company, that prints for a lot
of political campaigns, local where I live, statewide and national.
[inevitable hijack]
Yes - his first budget (submitted when his party controlled both houses of Congress) increased the deficit by some tens of billions of dollars, and he vetoed two welfare reform packages before realizing that it was going thru over his veto, and then signed a welfare reform bill essentially the same as the previous one, so that he could claim credit.
In neither case was he really committed to anything because it was his vision. He tried the health care package because Wofford had gotten elected on it, and so he thought that was the wave of the future for the electorate. Not because he thought it was a great idea, although his wife did.
[/inevitable hijack]
Clinton was extremely smart - about getting elected. That basically summed up his vision for the Presidency and the country, which is why when he was impeached, he had nothing to point to to offset his lies and sexual harassments.
He did, however, get NAFTA passed, by forming a coalition with centrist Democrats and the Republicans in Congress. If he had been able to do that with the same groups, and concentrated on centrist issues (instead of attempting to federalize the health care industry of the US), he may have been able to achieve something more than he did.
LBJ is another example of a bright but not brilliant President with a vision and a knack for getting legislation passed. That was what he was smart at, and he did a ton of it. Reagan was a President of average IQ (for a President - none of them were dumb in any normal sense of the term) who had vision. He wanted to rebuild the military, reduce taxes, defeat the USSR, and “fix” the economy.
Both were “successful” Presidents. LBJ got the Great Society, Reagan started the economic boom of the 80s and 90s and brought about the fall of our major enemy. LBJ was crippled by the war in Viet Nam; Reagan had the deficit. Both were followed by basically unsuccessful Presidents, who were probably smarter than they but not visionaries in the same way.
As previously posted, there are an almost infinite number of ways to be “smart”. Everybody has one, nobody has them all.
Regards,
Shodan
istara I see you did not answer my question regarding how many American presidents are sons of presidents, as you affirmed.
>> nepotism, (either direct father-son, or family connections) is one reason why US presidents aren’t necessarily the smartest people.
Please offer some support to that. What American presidents were clearly not bright and were elected mainly due to their family connections? Let’s have some examples and see if they are representative of the American system or exceptions to it. When you are so categoric i am sure you have many examples in mind.
So why doesn’t the smartest person get to be President?
Probably because Cecil’s way too busy as is.
Smart people don’t want the hassle of running for president. They don’t want the media poking around their past, questioning them and their friends about every instance when they got too drunk in college or rented a porno movie, or poking around their finances looking for embarrasing information.