Rendell Compares Obama to Adlai Stevenson (He's just another Democrat nerd).

The Washington comPost ^ | 8/26/08 | Jonathan Weisman

[Harry Wurzbach]

DENVER -- Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell captured the jitters of the Democratic Party today when he conceded that for all Barack Obama's gifts, "he's not exactly the easiest guy in the world to identify with" and urged the presumptive nominee to start punching back against Republican attacks.

In a wide ranging interview, Rendell insisted that while Obama still has not won over perhaps 30 percent of Hillary Rodham Clinton's voters, he will have locked down 95 percent of them by midnight tonight, after Clinton speaks to the Democratic National Convention here. But Rendell, a strong Clinton supporter during the primaries, made it clear he thinks Obama still has work to do with the white, working class voters who backed her.

"With people who have a lot of gifts, it's hard for people to identify with them," the governor said. "Barack Obama is handsome. He's incredibly bright. He's incredibly well spoken, and he's incredibly successful -- not exactly the easiest guy in the world to identify with."

For a politician cut from a rougher cloth, Rendell may have offered a back-handed compliment when he compared Obama to Adlai Stevenson, the failed Democratic candidate from the 1950s who captured the imagination of American intellectuals but not the electorate at large.

"He is a little like Adlai Stevenson," Rendell mused. "You ask him a question, and he gives you a six-minute answer. And the six-minute answer is smart as all get out. It's intellectual. It's well framed. It takes care of all the contingencies. But it's a lousy soundbite."

[AmishDude]

If anyone has read Liberal Fascism, they know that Woodrow Wilson was our first fascist president, and former president of Princeton.

Being unable to give a short declarative answer to a question is not a sign of intelligence, it’s either a sign of duplicity or a sign of stupidity.

Assuming that Obama isn’t using his 6 minutes to change the subject, he’s using that time to use language to obscure his answer. That is, after all, what he and Brooks and Noonan and Ayers and all the other rhetoriticians do for a living.

There is a reason the expression is “empty rhetoric” and far far too many people confuse it for intelligence.

Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem or to take a complicated concept and explain it in a simple way. This is what scientists, engineers and (my favorite) mathematicians do every day. People in the humanities, social sciences and law are tasked with taking a one sentence idea and stretching it into a 500-page book.

It’s a trope of the Left that their people are smarter. I would contend that, like Joe Biden, they are most often educated far beyond their intelligence.

But even if the Left is correct, Americans, generally, prefer not to be ruled by kings, even philosopher kings. Americans traditionally choose public servants and expect those servants to serve.

[SoCalPol]

*Liberal Fascism*

Yes, that is a great book.
A preference for our leaders, forget the Masters, PhDs
etc. Education that prepares you for the real world, and real world experience.
I talk to too many Masters, on up who can’t state which country bombed Pearl Harbor and worse.