George W. Bush is Smart

George W. Bush is Smart(keithhennessey.com)

55 points by tagx 13 years ago | 21 comments

Vivtek 13 years ago |

Pfft. If he understood what he was doing, I hate him more. So far I've always given him the benefit of the doubt when considering the results of his actions on 9/11, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, with the banking crisis, with Katrina, with secrecy, with making torture American policy, with No Child Left Behind, with the Patriot Act, and with turning a surplus into the worst recession in decades.

I'd hate to see what a mess a real genius would have made with all that.

All this story shows me is a man preternaturally gifted in terms of understanding the people around him, and bullshitting.

AutoCorrect 13 years ago | |

let me ask a rhetorical question: suppose you were the head of a large multinational corporation. Every day you have meetings where you have to make decisions that may irrevocably alter the course of the company. You depend on a small group of people to filter up to you all pertinent information needed to make the decisions accurately. How well do you think that would work? I say that no one can do very well in that instance, all the leader can do is set the tone, and hope that his people will implement the spirit of his intentions.

sp332 13 years ago | |

You should check out his autobiographical book Decision Points, wherein he apologizes for a lot of that crap.

danielrm26 13 years ago |

I think a lot of this confusion comes from what appears to be a mismatch between how he was when he was up and coming, vs. how he was in his later time as president.

If you watch his older speeches and ad-hoc interactions, he was extremely sharp. And if you watch him later he seemed easily confused and steeped in dogma.

I almost feel like he was poisoned, or beaten down, by the pressure of the presidency and the various narratives from Rove, Cheney, etc.

Either way, there's likely truth to both accounts--that he is both much brighter than people think he is, and that he often acted like a complete idiot.

dmlorenzetti 13 years ago | |

I read an analysis somewhere that claimed this degeneration was a symptom of alcohol and drug use in his early years. However, that analysis was on a partisan website, and I took it with a big grain of salt.

The main thing that struck me about the analysis was that it showed some of his earlier speeches, which I had never seen before, and he did indeed come across like a completely different person.

rdouble 13 years ago |

He got a 1200 on the SAT back when it was 1600 scale, and was a C average student at Yale. He released his own report card: http://2004.georgewbush.org/bios/yale-transcript.asp

Test scores and grades aren't everything, but it's hard to believe he's smarter than the current crop of Stanford MBAs. Top schools today are more competitive than they have ever been. He wouldn't have been considered for the schools he attended with those marks today.

loudmax 13 years ago |

It shouldn't be a surprise that GW Bush is smarter than his public image. By the end of his second term, his public image was that he is a complete moron. So the bar is set pretty low.

But the speeches and stumbles are only part of the reason for his poor public image. More significant is that his policies and decisions were catastrophically disastrous. We're still recovering from the mess that he made.

AutoCorrect 13 years ago | |

don't you mean that his policies and decisions were inadequate to fix the issues caused by his predecessor? <putsonflameretardantcoat>

headShrinker 13 years ago |

Smarter than most? Maybe. That's not saying much. The president needed to understand fractional banking, highly-complex social-economic models, world politics and most of all he needed to know the people he was dealing with. He didn't understand these things. His presidency is littered with all the evidence. I could give you a list of the screw ups but we all know them. The question is did he understand the economic collapse as it was happening, no, he didn't. It took economists a few months to understand.

tlrobinson 13 years ago | |

The author said he was smarter than most of his Stanford Business School students, not just the general population.

sp332 13 years ago | |

Why should we expect the president to understand better than the economists?

te_platt 13 years ago |

Politics aside, this is a good reminder on the importance of when confronted with an opposing viewpoint to consider "Why would a smart person think that?". They may in point of fact not be smart but it's too easy to use that as an excuse to stop thinking. Ever notice how hard it is to hear someone you respect say something you disagree with?

nate_martin 13 years ago |

People often associate Presidents' public images with how intelligent they are. People look at the videos of Bush making speech gaffes and assume he is a moron because he occasionally uses pseudo-english. What is weird about the presidential office is that we never actually see any of our presidents doing their job. We only see their image and how they communicate with the public.

russnewcomer 13 years ago |

This is a common story that many personal observers have told about Mr. Bush and other presidents, or CEOs. See, for example, http://theamericanscholar.org/dubya-and-me/ as a story from another observer about Mr. Bush. I remember a similar story about Bill Clinton, and really, anyone who has watched the Frost/Nixon tapes (not the movie) realizes how fiercely intelligent Nixon was, even if he didn't come across the best.

Then there's Steve Yegge's ( https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV... ) comments about Jeff Bezos and Joel Spolsky's ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html ) about meetings at Microsoft when Bill Gates was heavily involved.

I also have a friend who worked briefly as a speechwriter for the president of a Central Asian country, and he has said that before he went to work for the Palace, he thought that all of the people there were just lazy, unintelligent, corrupt, and didn't do anything. When he got there, he realized that they were some of the hardest working, smartest, and least corrupt people there.

I think that my point (and the point the author is trying to make) is that people in positions of high power are usually smarter and usually understand more than we who are outside that position and outside those corridors think that they do. I think anecdotes like the ones linked above go to prove that.

andrewtbham 13 years ago |

The reason I like HN is because stuff like this doesn't often get on here. This is flame bait. Unfortunately, I have been sucked in.

I don't think George Bush was stupid. I think he was incompetent and arrogant. The two biggest public examples are "Mission Accomplished" and "You're doing a good job Brownie." I think he built a bad team and promoted loyalty over competence. Like Condi Rice... Steve Jobs would have fired the national security advisor after 9/11. George Bush promoted her to Secretary of State. Terrible leader. I felt a sigh of relief when he left office.

anigbrowl 13 years ago |

An interesting read, although I think he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

The press and his opponents highlighted President Bush’s occasional stumbles when giving a speech. President Obama’s similar verbal miscues are ignored.

Oh nonsense, I could reel off a list of Obama gaffes from the present to back before he became President, largely because people who oppose the President repeat them endlessly. Those same people seem to think Obama's the first President ever to use a teleprompter, or at least are pretend they do.

Now, I never thought Bush was unintelligent; he ran his father's election campaigns, and you don't get to be governor of a large state, or President, without any smarts. I do think that Bush and many of his administration suffered from some alarming cognitive biases, and the smarter a person is the easier it is for them to fall into the trap of believing in their own inevitable correctness (I've done so myself many a time). I can't help feeling that he's treating the financial crisis and some structural deficit issues as unforeseeable events that just happened to fall out of the sky during the tenure of the Bush administration.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I consider Bush's tactical intelligence to be a lot higher than his strategic intelligence; he's a very skilled politician but a pretty poor show as a statesman. History may prove me wrong but I'd be willing to put a bet that it won't.

bicknergseng 13 years ago |

I wish media would stop portraying people or ideas in positions of prominence as "idiotic," or "insane," or what-have-you. All that does is drive political agendas by dividing people into us and them groups, while discouraging productive dialog.

That said, I wonder why, if Bush was as intelligent as this guy claims, he made so many catastrophically bad decisions. Does high intelligence not correlate with the ability to make intelligent decisions? I'm sure Kahneman would have an interesting analysis.

geekam 13 years ago |

I cannot find that video/text from Chomsky where he says the same thing about G. W. Bush and that every politician has a persona.

newnewnew 13 years ago |

Let's see how long this stays on the front page. HN does not like conservative politicians.

DanBC 13 years ago | |

I flag this article because it's anecdote about a politician. His party is irrelevant to my decision to flag.

There's probably not much meaningful discussion that will happen from this article. Maybe something that could happen is "Why do politicians have to act dumb?" - there are examples of well educated 'posh' English MPs faking a less posh accent; there are examples of US polls asking who you'd like to have a beer with.

Democracy really sucks in England, and from what I can tell it sucks even more in the US.

Obviously it's better than any alternative, but the versions we have are broken in ways that are hard to fix and which give us really bad, weird, outcomes.

jamesaguilar 13 years ago |

I seem to recall him getting bad grades in school too, right. I'm not totally convinced by this article. In any case, does it really matter how smart the guy was when he made so many really bad decisions on important issues like attacking countries for no reason?