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As for Clinton only having an IQ of 137. He wasn't my cup of tea but I always thought he was far smarter than that. I'm told he could recite verbatim long passages from policy documents he'd read years before.

Having a high IQ and having a near-photographic memory are not the same thing, and one is often found without the other. In extreme cases there are the absent-minded geniuses on one end, and the idiot-savants on the other.

As for Clinton, here's a fascinating article I first read when it came out in 1998, and have found it to be very illuminating in the years since: Can the President Think? .

It's a *long* read, but well worth it. At the risk of condensing it too far, it makes the case that Clinton has a superb (almost photographic) memory and a natural ability to charm people by sensing what they want to hear (and an emotional need to do so), but that he suffers from almost no ability to analyze information himself. He's just good at covering it and *looking* like his mind is going 100mph.

As for Clinton, here's a fascinating article I first read when it came out in 1998, and have found it to be very illuminating in the years since: Can the President Think? .

Sorry, I fumbled the link. Here's a working one: Can the President [Clinton] Think?".

If that ancient snapshot of a FreeRepublic post goes down, here's a link to an online copy of the original publication.

It's a *long* read, but well worth it. At the risk of condensing it too far, it makes the case that Clinton has a superb (almost photographic) memory and a natural ability to charm people by sensing what they want to hear (and an emotional need to do so), but that he suffers from almost no ability to analyze information himself. He's just good at covering it and *looking* like his mind is going 100mph.

Thanks, I went to the piece and read it. (A good subtitle for the article would have been "The Attention Deficit Disorder President.") The Clinton it describes reminds me of myself in some ways (reading five books at once and finishing none of them).

I read "Can the President think?" when it was published. A few years later he and his lovely wife inspired me to read Cleckley's "Mask of Sanity" and Hare's "Without a Conscience", two excelent studies of psychopathy.

When it comes to the Cl*nt*ns, though, it could be narcissistic personality disorder (Or it could be both