Keith Hennessey:
The new George W. Bush Presidential Center is being dedicated this week. This seems like a good time to bust a longstanding myth about our former President, my former boss.
I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.
One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”
The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.
I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”
More silence.
I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.
I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer. While it was a while ago, here is an amalgam of that answer and others I have given in similar contexts.
I am not kidding. You are quite an intelligent group. Don’t take it personally, but President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. Were he a student here today, he would consistently get “HP” (High Pass) grades without having to work hard, and he’d get an “H” (High, the top grade) in any class where he wanted to put in the effort.
For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.
President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.
I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.
We treat Presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice.
In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.
And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both.
On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)
Whenever this episode is recounted, the more I enjoy it. I know it is popular belief in liberal and conservative circles, that George W. Bush didn’t quite understand the gravity of events – especially at the end of his second term. He understood more cogently than anyone else. The part when he said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” That is the hallmark of leadership. The crap from the pundits, pretender-in-chief, etc. can’t and will not believe GWB is smarter than us.
Democrats continually pat themselves on the back and claim that they are more intelligent than everyone else. The have no proof to support their claim. Oh they will try to point out that there are more Democrat college graduates. But an ability to obtain a college degree is not actually a measure of intelligence. All it proves is that the recipient was able to sit through classes and learn enough of what ever subject they were majoring in so as to have passed their college exams.
The real reason Democrats want to be able to “claim” they are more intelligent, is so that they can use that to support their notion of socialist rule by their “educated” party leader-elite.
Yet when you listen to all the ridiculous idiotic statements made by their supposedly higher-educated party leaders, you will often realize that something doesn’t quite mesh with their presumptive premise. Turn off his teleprompter, and Obama becomes a worse orator than one-time VP candidate Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale. Of course, as his records are sealed, we only have the fawning Democrat Obamination’s s assurances to Obama’s supposed intelligence, But they lie so much who can take them at their word.
I would say as far back as and including Eisenhower Republican Presidents are portrayed as stupid, bumblers and fools. Whereas we are told Democrat Presidents are smart, caring, concerned and thoughtful.
Perception is reality, but it may not be the truth.
I would agree with you that that a college degree BA or BS degree doesn’t really indicate high intelligence but post grad oust doc. Degrees might be a better indicator and yes those people do tend to vote Dem
And of course all the mist selective colleges are notiriously liberal
Democrats seem to be able to get away with perpetuating numerous misconceptions. Racist Republicans, caring Democrats is one. Successful war on poverty another. Like the theory of the “big lie”, with all the clear evidence around, it is surprising these fantasies survive. However, the fallacy of the “smart liberal” is definitely the most difficult to prove. Upon what evidence is this based?
Obama was touted as a genius, though ALL of the supporting “credentials” are kept, for some reason, locked away. Absent are accomplishments or legacies of policies enacted. Nothing, nada, zilch. He is smart because it is said to be so. They are smart because THEY say THEY are.
Obama is clever, not genius. Of course, it is not difficult to look smart when all the media says you are and that is the one and only factor in their favor. But, it’s a grand factor. The power of propaganda is great. Hopefully, as some point, some of these followers will see the glaring discrepancies and begin to wonder, “Why lie?” Then it will finally come tumbling down.
@John: Based on the liberalization of higher education, it could be argued that the longer one spends in college, the more stupid one can become. Obama’s alleged education and how he has employed that education is a case in point.
@Bill:
No truer words have I heard — I’ve personal experience with some phd’s that were not ‘smart’ — basically their egos and the supportive a$$kissers around them created an aura of ‘intelligence’ that was way out of proportion — the most typical symptom was an inability to admit gaps in knowledge of some fact in their field – and in the worst cases – inability to discuss at any level some other field of knowledge – because they had to ‘admit’ some ‘lack’ of knowledge – — and it is getting worse since I have started seeing these same symptoms more often in BS and MS level — seems like it is related to the number of psycho-babble classes they had to take to get their piece of paper
@John: Looks like you need some second grade spelling lessons.
@Bill:
Not true. there are NO supporting “credentials” so they’re not locked away. We know he was never a student at Columbia, only a pot head at Occidental and only an Affirmative action admittance to Harvard with nothing accomplised in class to keep a record of. His appointment to Harvard Law Review was Affirmative action. He doesn’t have a law license, guilty of lying on application.
@Budvarakbar
So true. I know/knew some PhD’s that only had an academic knowledge of the world. No ‘real life’ experience. Nothing to draw on. Only thesis experiences.
@Redteam: No doubt, Bush is smarter than John.
@Bill:
a fence post is smarter than John.