ok let's acknowledge that the nature of the conversation is shifting here. the bottom line with palin is that she hasn't a clue. it's not a question of experience or fluent sentences or her SAT score. i actually think zakaria is right about this -- it's not that she doesn't know the answers; it's that she doesn't understand the questions. how articulate she is is only part of that, but her semi-articulate charm comes in when it's plainly a papering over of fundamental incompetence. but it's worse than that. it's bad enough that women have to be like men to be successful in the public arena, but it sure seems worse when a stereotype pretty ditz like palin becomes the marker of the way "forward" for women in public life. i would really love to hear our friend-of-many-aliases (whom i shall call "shag" for the sake of simplicity) on this point. maybe i will forward.
so in any case, i think what you're saying about eisenhower is precisely not the point about palin. i think.
[heads up: the rest of this post meanders a bit and it's not at all clear it actually winds up anywhere. enter at your own risk. we do not accept responsibility for lost or stolen attention.]
picking up on michael's response to this, then (rather than sending a separate post), the better comparison than reagan is W. he was very effective when he arrived with a mandate (actually, 9/11 helped with that) and a pack of people who actually knew how to get things done, and if the standard is simple effectiveness, never mind what we think of the agenda, i'd be surprised if any objective measure finds him tremendously less effective than reagan. remember that reagan's second term saw a sharp decline in his ability to get legislation through congress -- this was surely attributable at least in part to iran-contra, but it besets all second-term presidents, and reagans alzheimer's might have been a factor at that point.
i would also be surprised, however, if historical evaluation regards W as anything better than the worst or nearly worst president we had, and that can only be understood to take a whole picture into account -- his ability to deal with people, for example, the actual leadership he does or doesn't provide, the messes he gets us into vs. the messes he cleans up, etc. etc. W will be nowhere near reagan in *anyone's* estimation.
with respect to clinton . . . again, i think clinton has to be seen as pretty effective, at least in his first term. the big failures were on gays in the military, health care, and in certain respects i guess the v-chip, but he and gore cut gov't payrolls way more than ronald "i hate big gov't" reagan, ended welfare as we knew it, gutted the fourth amendement, all sorts of crazy stuff we wish they hadn't done. and we know about his second term. for a barometer of his leadership and popularity, though, remember the gov't-shutdown standoff, where he basically ate newt's lunch, newt the guy who had the mandate. even in the midst of impeachment he had numbers that dwarf W's. because he brought something to the table.
so i don't know. i'm working this out as i go, in case you can't tell. :)
i don't think it's at all clear that there's some direct correlation between intelligence and "effectiveness," if effectiveness means passing legislation, for example, much less between intelligence and adoption of a left agenda (:-). likewise, it seems reasonably clear that there's at best no correlation between experience and a successful (if successful = well-regarded) presidency, and there might even be a negative correlation (if you don't feel this intuitively, see if this helps: <
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Info/experience.html>; i wonder if we could get something like this for "smart").
actually, if you take the rankings in that link, just eyeballing it, there might not be much relationship between success or "greatness" and "smart," although you have to admit there's a fair bit of smart in that top pile. and someone like eisenhower counts, i think. maybe the think to do would be to try to measure the extent of their education and correlate that, but of course standardizing across that time would be a lot harder with education than with experience, i think.
anyway, i don't know where i've gotten.
i will say that W's folksiness ended in catastrophe, but he got elected because he connected. doesn't that make sense? and you could say the same about reagan, clinton, and quite probably obama. gore lost in no small part because he failed to connect. that was in part at least because he's an egg-head, but clinton and obama at the very least show that you can be egg-headed and still connect, so maybe the egg-head part isn't the thing.
sorry. wish i had an actual punchline for you, if you've read this far.
On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 6:24 PM, Carrol Cox
<cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jim & Jeffrey may be right about Bush (and Palin) -- I wo't argue it.
But I experienced Eisenhower's adminnistration, and his performance was
every bit as illiterate as Bush's, and yet he was probably one of the
most sophisticated & intelligent me ever to be president. He would joke
with his subordinates about "dumbing" up a position to confuse people.
And on general principles it is not wise to underestimate a foe's
intelligence -- especially if he/she has the u.s. treasury to pay for
intelligent aides & subordinates. What counts is the intelligence of the
Administration, not the merely individual intelligence of the president.
Carrol