It's a bit of "damning with faint praise".
Also, Ehrlich is not writing an FR or blog rant for people that already don't like Obama anyway, which is a pointless waste of time.
He's trying to write a persuasive opinion piece that at least has the chance of changing the mind of an Obama supporter. They're not going to keep reading past "Obama is a complete idiot."
Excellent post. He’s not saying Obama’s any kind of genius, just saying that complete idiots don’t usually rise that high. After getting that out of the way, he quickly moves on to his criticism.