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George W. Bush is Smart

keithhennessey.com

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Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#11

Post by DanBC »

newnewnew wrote: post #4

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

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.

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#12

Post by sp332 »

headShrinker wrote: post #2

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…

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

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#14

Post by AutoCorrect »

loudmax wrote: post #8

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.

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

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#15

Post by rdouble »

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.

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#16

Post by danielrm26 »

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.

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#17

Post by tlrobinson »

headShrinker wrote: post #2

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…

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

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#18

Post by sp332 »

[deleted] wrote: post #13
newnewnew wrote: post #4

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

[deleted]

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" is a quote from Stephen Colbert, when he was in-character as a right-wing pundit for a comedy show. Reality, by definition, has no bias.

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#19

Post by AutoCorrect »

Vivtek wrote: post #6

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 mes…

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.

Re: George W. Bush is Smart

#20

Post by nate_martin »

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.
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