Truesee's Daily Wonder

IT’S a foolish question, asking how smart a politician is.

It’s too vague. It ignores all the different wrinkles of intelligence and ways to measure it, along with the debatable link between brain power as it’s typically defined and skilled governance in terms of actual results. It’s a vessel for prejudices, a stand-in for grievances.

And yet it comes back around almost every election cycle, as it’s doing now.

Meet Rick Perry. At Texas A&M University, his grades were so poor he was on academic probation. He flunked advanced organic chemistry, which, in his defense, sounds eminently flunkable. He got a C in animal breeding, which doesn’t. For a “principles of economics” course, he attained a glittering D, as The Huffington Post detailed. You won’t be hearing him mention that much amid all his talk about Texas jobs creation.

His academic background, coupled with his rejection of climate change and fondness for gauzy generalities, prompted a story in Politico last week with this subtle headline: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?”

Based on grades alone, it seems so. But by that yardstick, even a politician as outwardly cerebral as Al Gore has some explaining to do. Gore got his very own college D — in a course about man’s place in nature, no less. Granted, this was at Harvard. But still.

Perry can’t dazzle in policy discussions. That’s also clear. The farther he ventures from Texas, the smaller he shrinks. When the radio talk show host Laura Ingraham recently tried to get him to say something specific — anything specific — about how America should deal with China, he clung so tightly to banalities that she was forced twice to plead: “What does that mean?”

But he’s savvy enough to have assembled a political team and adopted a political strategy that have him leading the (flawed) Republican field in a raft of recent polls. There’s something to that. Something more than excellent hair.

I’m less troubled by how thickheaded Perry may be than by how wrongheaded we already know he is on issues like evolution, which he says is just a theory, and homosexuality, which he has likened to alcoholism.

President Obama has those issues right. And can talk authoritatively about them and most others. A former editor of the Harvard Law Review, he has that kind of mind, that kind of fluency. In this one poised man, erudition and eloquence join hands.

But they don’t save him. Last week, he set himself up once again to look like the nation’s deferrer in chief by proposing a date for his jobs speech that had the possibility of provoking Republican opposition and did precisely that, at which point he retreated. Is this the Mother-May-I presidency? With John Boehner in the role of paddle-wielding matriarch?

That many Republicans will viciously seize any opportunity to defy and undercut Obama is a lesson he should have learned by now. Regardless of who was being unreasonable, it was he who actually ended up sending an e-mail to supporters with the one-word subject line “frustrated.” The president of the United States is supposed to salve our frustrations, not meekly bemoan his own.

Shouldn’t he or someone in his inner circle have foreseen the potential for events unfolding in such a humiliating fashion and made sure to avoid it? Apparently no one did, and that suggests a deficit of smarts by almost any definition of that ludicrously imprecise term.

Worse yet, this was only the latest in a long series of questionable calculations. Was it smart/prudent/pick-your-adjective to lavish all that precious post-election political capital on health care reform rather than economic revitalization and jobs creation, especially if it winds up being the first in a chain of dominoes that leads to defeat in 2012 and the repeal of that precise legislation?

Was it smart/prudent/pick-your-adjective not to head off a debt-ceiling showdown by settling the matter during last year’s lame-duck session of Congress, before Republicans took the reins in the House? And, during the showdown, didn’t Obama and his advisers misjudge both the zeal of some House Republicans and the magnitude of his own powers of persuasion?

Time and again, Obama hasn’t been a prescient or brutal enough tactician and hasn’t adjusted his high-minded ways to the low-minded sport of Congressional politics. That’s a failure of some kind, and intelligence may be one word for it.

“Is Obama Smart?” the Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens asked in early August. That was the headline, and it’s at least as good a question, in terms of the president’s political efficacy of late, as the one Politico posed about Perry.

THAT Perry’s headline contained the harsher adjective — “dumb” — is typical, say many Republicans, who complain that journalists tend to equate the anti-intellectualism and populist affects of many of their party’s candidates with outright stupidity. They cite Ronald Reagan as an example of someone first dismissed as a dunce and understood only later to be wise in some basic, consequential ways.

And they say that Democrats get a greater pass on gaffes than Republicans do. There’s merit to the argument. The recent verbal hiccup with which Joe Biden seemed to endorse China’s one-child policy lengthened a formidable list of Bidenisms, including his statement in 2007 that Obama, as a presidential contender, was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” But Biden’s intelligence is seldom questioned, not the way it would be if he had a Tea Party affiliation and Southern drawl.

Then there’s the whole matter of whether we’re well served by a brainy president. In an excellent piece in Slate in 1999, Jacob Weisberg explored a growing body of thought that a president’s supposed brilliance (or lack thereof) has no bearing on success in office. By this theory, relatively ordinary smarts yielded extraordinary accomplishment (Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman) while extreme intelligence led to defeat (Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover).

Weisberg rightly noted the huge flaws with this analysis, including the small sample size and the subjectivity involved in judging achievement. Here’s another: what makes Carter more brilliant than Roosevelt — or, for that matter, Reagan?

That assessment reflects a narrow, traditional understanding of smarts as a sort of academic aptitude, a facility with facts and language. But a whole genre of best-selling books over the last decade and a half insist — correctly, I think — that there are various ways to be clever: “Emotional Intelligence,” “The Wisdom of Crowds,” a knack for gut responses formed in the span of a “Blink.” None require exemplary SAT scores.

Instead of talking about how smart politicians are or aren’t, we should have an infinitely more useful, meaningful conversation about whether we share and respect their values and whether they have shown themselves to be effective. Someone who rates high on both counts is someone to rally unreservedly around.

Right now, neither Perry nor Obama fits that double bill.