Yeah, I laughed pretty hard, too, when I read Dana Milbank’s nutty theory (unless it was really intended to be a joke). Jen Rubin isn’t impressed by it, either:
I hate to be prosaic about this, but what is the evidence that Obama is a complex guy? ( None of the three gurus have met or actually diagnosed him, of course, and I’d bet, just a wild guess here, that they are liberal Democrats who just think he is swell.)
After all, Obama has not blazed new political or policy trails as Bill Clinton did. He’s written no scholarly books (sorry, memoirs don’t count). His understanding of the Middle East has been so slight and his strategy so misguided that there are no Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and we have been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping the hegemonic aspirations of Iran. I mean, isn’t it just as likely that Obama’s a garden-variety liberal with poor decision-making skills?
Much more likely, actually. I’d go with Occam’s Razor here. And as she notes, they said the same thing about Jimmy Carter.
[Update mid morning]
Jonah Goldberg doesn’t think much of Milbank’s thesis, either.
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
— George Orwell
I don’t care.
Obama is awesome!
In a related note, Obama has announced a national day of mourning. The inventor of the teleprompter has died.
I was going to protest somewhat and mention that Carter at least had a degree in nuclear engineering, which ought to qualify him as “smart” in a particular fashion (haven’t we all known brilliant engineers who were completely inept in seemingly every other way?). However, just to make sure, I looked it up, and found he only had an “undesignated bachelor of science degree”.
All Democrats are geniuses, and all Republicans dumb as toast, when the metric is how much they agree with the politics of the judges. It’s like Gavin Schmidt’s metric for Climate Change – it’s whatever the mandarins define it to be.
Reading the article, I had to facepalm this part:
Uh, YEAH! Providing predictable leadership should be THE GOAL. Providing predicable leadership is what allows people to plan and allocate resources rationally and efficiently. You would have to be an ADHD idiot to consider that a defect.