Is Senator Barack Obama Truly Too Elite To Be Elected President?

>>>>>>I don’t know that Obama’s being a liberal-socialist would mean that he wants to capitulate to the Islamofascists. The Russian communists fought the Islamofascists for years.

Then you don't understand politics in the US today. Who opposes the WOT and the invasion of Iraq? The Democratic Party. Who constitutes the Democratic Party? The anti-war liberal-socialists. The USSR was a totalitarian government and opposed the Islamofascists as a matter of their desire for world conquest.

I graduated magna cum laude from a large state university and was promptly humbled when I met my contemporaries at that Ivy League school. Wow, I still had to work my butt off (more than I did as an undergrad) and they didn’t understand why I needed to work so hard.

Easy to be a big fish in a little pond wasn’t it? Showed up at the lake and we weren’t so big anymore. It was the greatest character building experience of my life.

I don't recognize the world I've been living in my whole life in Dean's caricature.

Nixon was undoubtably brighter than Humphrey. Probably brighter than RFK. Though not as smart as Eugene McCarthy, who as they say was smart enough to be interested in politics but too smart to think it mattered.

But you can see a problem right there: George Wallace was anti-elitist, but an extremely clever man. There were all the reasons in the world not to vote for him, but he certainly knew politics. By contrast, some who had academic knowledge, like Humphrey or Dukakis, showed little in the way of real world smarts.

Ford vs. Carter? I'd say not much to brag about on either side. But how serious was that whole "nuclear physicist" or "nuclear engineer" thing? Maybe Carter was literally a "nuclear engineer" who could come close to understanding how a reactor works, but didn't know much about politics. Ford by contrast, more than held his own at Yale Law School.

Carter vs. Reagan? Reagan did a lot of reading and writing that's only recently coming to light. I can't see that Carter was any great leading light intellectually, though James Fallows and others may have flattered him into thinking that fatalistic declinism was the sign of great minds.

Reagan vs. Mondale? Mondale went through the same kind of narrowing process in the Senate and the Vice Presidency that Humphrey did. He also had that phlegmatic Scandinavian temperament that tends to turn everything into a grey fog. Mondale may have been intelligent, but never really showed it.

Maybe it's with the Bushes that Dean's analysis has some merit. But really, politicians are a lot more on the same level than this sort of analysis admits. John Kerry wasn't any towering intellect, and I'm afraid Al Gore wasn't either. With Kerry it was more a matter of getting into St. Paul's as a boy, not of showing any great intellectual prowess there or afterwards.

Democrats want the approval of intellectuals. They try to win over the academics who in turn pay court to the politicians. Republicans don't. Usually it works out well for the Republicans. But sometimes they leave too much smarts behind with the book learning.

But Ronald Reagan, whom no one will ever accuse of being an intellectual (his favored briefing material as president was Reader's Digest) trounced the elitist Carter in 1980, and then the far more mentally agile Walter Mondale in 1984.

. . . and skunked the "far more mentally agile" Gorbychev after that . . .
Dean may not accuse Reagan of being an intellectual, but he will also be embarrassed to try to name a Democrat who wrote more than Reagan did.
And as far as the super intelligence of Dean himself is concerned, Carter did in fact study nuclear technology, but doesn't hold a degree in physics and hardly was in danger of making the world forget Dr. Edward Teller. So calling Carter a "physicist" is a stretch.
Ann Coulter had a whole chapter in Slander about Democrats' ridiculous claims of the genius IQ levels of their presidential candidates.

But Ronald Reagan, whom no one will ever accuse of being an intellectual

Really? Interesting.. considering he spent more time thinking, writing and articulating his viewpoints and conclusions than any President in my lifetime I find this statement to be, well.. like most liberal diatribes... excrement from the mouth.

The day he left the democratic party for the republican, he showed he had far more intellect than anyone you have put forth as intelligent. And no, Mr. Fauxbama is not idiot savant...he's just an idiot.

Truly smart people don’t have to go around boasting about it all the time. Liberals like John Dean, Keith Olbermann, Gore, Dukakis, Kerry, et al, have to constantly tell us they’re smart because otherwise nobody would ever think they were. Reagan simply rolled up his sleeves and got the job done. He didn’t pontificate in psuedo-intellectual fashion about some Marxist professor’s esoteric assertion that the Soviet Union would have been an economic dynamo with a little tweaking here and there.

Ask Reagan about abortion and he’d say that since a new human life begins at conception, it deserves protection. Ask him about same-sex “marriage” and he’d say only a woman can be a man’s biological mate and soulmate. Ask him what to do about an enemy’s military build-up, and he’d say build up our military so they don’t dare attack us.

Ask John Dean & Friends those questions and you’d get a 500 page harangue about how life is an undefinable concept and how gender is a social construction and how America is a neo-fascist state and that if we’d just disarm, we’d enter a realm of pacifist utopianism. And they’d then pat themselves on the back for being oh so very smart.

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