Smarty Pants
Peg on Aug 18 2008 at 5:56 am | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Election 2008, Media, Peg's Page
Every day, Professor Keith Burgess-Jackson reprints a Letter to the Editor from the New York Times. This offering left me gape-jawed.
The Professor’s first point is well-taken.
Where is the evidence that Barack Obama is more intelligent than John McCain? Have they taken intelligence tests?
One might argue that because Obama performed better in college than McCain, he is the more intelligent of the two. Yet, we all know many people where one individual had a superior college record to another, but the first is not more intelligent than the second. Perhaps Obama is smarter than McCain. But, I do not know of any overwhelming evidence that this is so.
In any case - let us grant the writer this point. So what? While a certain level of intelligence is assuredly required for someone to be a good President - it is but a necessary condition, and not a sufficient one. A wide variety of other factors matter: character, experience, leadership, voting record, viewpoints on issues and more. Essentially, this is Keith’s second point:
Americans want an intelligent president, but not at the cost of good character and good judgment.
If people believe that Obama is a superior candidate to McCain - that is their decision. Yet, their choice should be based upon this entire set of qualities - not simply which man is smarter than the other.
Finally, the writer’s point about race is not framed properly. Of course racism has not been eliminated; I am not aware of any reasonably sized society on the planet where all hate and racism has been excised. Unfortunately, I believe that a certain amount of hate, racism, sexism, anti-semitism and the like is endemic to the human condition. It will never disappear entirely within my lifetime - or that of future lifetimes.
The question we need to ask is this: is racism diminished enough and have racists been re-educated and shamed enough that racism is low enough to allow a non-white to win a Presidential election? I believe that it is. Of course, if Obama does not win this fall, I am sure that many will pin the blame on racism. In part - they may be correct. Nevertheless, it just may be that enough people do think that McCain’s set of characteristics: his intelligence, leadership, qualifications, moral fiber, experience and voting record is more of what they want than Obama has to offer.
We shall see.
My brother actually took a class from Burgess-Jackson years ago and was very impressed. He was the first person to ever blogroll the LCP site. He’s a very good blogger.