John Dean: Is Obama Too Smart to be President?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: March 21, 2008 10:38:50 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] John Dean: Is Obama Too Smart to be President?

[Note:  This item comes from reader Randall.  DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40 () insightbb com>
Date: March 21, 2008 2:37:54 PM PDT
Subject: John Dean:   Is Obama Too Smart to be President?


Barack Obama's Smart Speech "A More Perfect Union": Did It Reveal Him  
To Be Too Intellectual To Be President?
<http://writ.lp.findlaw.com/dean/20080321.html>

By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Mar. 21, 2008

By way of disclaimer, I do not have a favored candidate in the 2008  
Democratic nomination contest. But I do appreciate the new (or perhaps  
simply long-forgotten) and higher levels to which Senator Barack Obama  
is taking political discourse. His historic speech on race this week,  
for example, was as smart as they come.

There was a time in this country when political debate was actually  
rather sophisticated, but that was long ago (for as mass media grew,  
the level of debate went down). Only time will tell, however, if  
Obama's powerful speech was also politically smart.

Obama Speech Was Frank, Direct, and Intelligent - But Was It Pitched  
to Too Advanced an Audience?

With his speech addressing race in America, Obama has done something  
that few politicians are willing to do: speak with compelling  
intellectual honesty. Rather than fuzzy-up difficult and troubling  
questions about race, he confronted them directly. Rather than  
avoiding issues that are typically ignored, he brought them forward  
for public discussion. Most strikingly, he did this with nuance, great  
tact, and conspicuous intelligence.

Many commentators were struck by the level of erudition Senator Obama  
employed in his speech. For example, Newsweek's Howard Fineman asked,  
"Did the blockheads understand it?" Not wanting to sound elitist,  
Howard quickly added that of course, everyone is a bit of a blockhead.  
I do not know if everyone understood the speech or not, but I do know  
that it is a pleasure to have a candidate running for the highest  
office in the land who is not only not trying to pretend to be dumb  
and inarticulate but rather willingly showing he is, in fact, smart as  
hell.

Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech was not unlike his insightful  
and somewhat erudite books - Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of  
Hope - with one large exception: Relatively few people will read  
Obama's books but many have been (or may be) exposed to his historic  
speech.

Computers have made it rather simple to determine the intelligence or  
grade level of a speech by measuring it with the Flesch-Kincaid test,  
which is found on the Tools/Options menu of Microsoft Word. This  
widely-employed measurement device determines the degree of difficulty  
of the written (and spoken) word.

Enterprising linguists and others have applied the test to a wide  
variety of material. For instance, the folks at youDictionary have  
tested the inaugural addresses of presidents. They discovered that no  
president since Woodrow Wilson has come close to delivering speeches  
pitched at a 12th grade level. Bush II's first inaugural address was  
at a 7.5 grade level, which ranked him near Eisenhower's second  
address (7.5), Nixon's first (7.6), LBJ's only (7.0), and FDR's fourth  
(8.1). Clinton's two addresses, by contrast, scored at the 9th grade  
level (9.4 and 8.8 respectively).

I tested Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech and it scores at a 10.5  
grade level, which by current standards is in the stratosphere. But  
maybe he was being too smart to win the presidency.

Republicans Have Dumbed Down the Presidency

Hillary Clinton - who is every bit Obama's intellectual equal - is  
increasingly running against his eloquence, and claiming that  
eloquence is all he has and that he is too inexperienced to be  
commander-in-chief and solve real-world problems. During and since the  
Ohio and Texas primaries, I've noticed that Senator Clinton has been  
showing less and less of her own conspicuous wonkiness and brain- 
power, a strategy that seems to be working to her advantage.

Senator Clinton's new populism has not become anti-intellectual (yet),  
but she surely knows that her husband hid his intelligence during his  
presidential campaigns, playing up his good ole boy roots rather than  
his Yale/Oxford credentials. Savvy Democrats understand they cannot  
win the White House by appearing smarter than their GOP opponent.

This is not a cynical observation, but rather a factual one.  
Republicans have spent the past half century dumbing-down the American  
presidency, for it has helped them win the White House Colleen Shogan,  
wearing her political scientist hat, has assembled epigrammatic case  
studies demonstrating the effectiveness of the anti-intellectualism of  
Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W.  
Bush.

For example, when Dwight Eisenhower ran against Illinois Governor  
Adlai Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956), Eisenhower ignored the fact that  
he had been first in his class at West Point and president of Columbia  
University. Meanwhile, his surrogates portrayed Stevenson as an  
"egghead" intellectual, which was untrue but easy to do given  
Stevenson's remarkably eloquent speaking style. (In fact, Stevenson  
had flunked out of Harvard Law School, although he later graduated  
from Northwestern Law School.) In office, too, Eisenhower governed  
with a "hidden hand," continuing to hide his intelligence.

Reagan was seen as an "amiable dunce," and history is still not sure  
if his Alzheimer's condition took hold well before he left office. Yet  
his collected letters demonstrate more thoughtfulness and policy  
savvy, at least earlier in his life, than many suspected. George Bush  
reminded Yale students when visiting his alma mater that "to the C  
students - I say, you, too, can be President of the United States." In  
contrast, rival John Kerry's campaign (mistakenly it now seems) had  
taken pains to portray him as highly intelligent - yet Kerry's Yale  
grades were just as weak as Bush's. The putative GOP nominee for 2008,  
John McCain, follows in the Republican tradition of anti- 
intellectualism, as the fifth man from the bottom of his Naval Academy  
graduating class.

[snip]



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