"Trust Me, Paul Ryan is Really Smart"

While driving yesterday I heard somebody present a question to Byron York to the effect of, "I keep hearing that Paul Ryan is really smart, but the only evidence people offer in support of that is 'He read Ayn Rand in high school and he wrote a budget plan.' Why should I believe he's smart?"

York fumbled out an answer that, unintentionally, spoke highly of the President and not so highly of Ryan. Specifically, York argued that Ryan has mastered details of the budget, and if you meet with him in private he will wow you with his grasp of those details. I'm reminded of fifth grade, in which some kids I knew had memorized pretty much every detail from the back of trading cards for the entire NHL roster. The kids at issue weren't slouches, but I need a bit more than that to be wowed by a grown-up.

York's next argument was that Ryan was not only the Republican Party's front man on the budget, but that the President took him seriously and met with him to discuss budget issues. That is reasonably accepted as a compliment of the President - the implicit argument is that nobody as smart as Obama would agree to discuss budget issues with a mediocre mind. I thus see what York is attempting to argue, but I don't think the point holds. That is, if I am going to negotiate over something, and my opponent in the negotiation is markedly less intelligent than I am, I'm going to be very happy with my opponent's choice of representative. I'm certainly not going to argue, "No, send in somebody who is my equal."

I'm not suggesting that to be the case, either - when the Republicans say "This is our budget guy," who would York expect the President to meet with? The most obvious inference that can be drawn from the fact that the President discussed budget issues with Ryan is not that he's a strong or weak opponent, but that he's the guy his party put in the position

At the end of his response, York preferred to answer a question of his own rather than the one the caller asked. That is, rather than pointing to evidence of Ryan's smarts, York instead argued that Ryan's knowledge about the federal budget is "beyond question". Frankly, it's not beyond question - if you look at Ryan's budget proposals the first thing that strikes you is that he has omitted the most relevant details. Perhaps he's willing to discuss those details, in private and off-the-record, but I don't feel any need to take York's word for it.

If I am to accept York's argument, it's actually quite damning of Ryan. If I assume he's a smart man with encyclopedic knowledge of the budget, the he knows what spending he will need to cut to turn his budget proposal into reality. If I am rejecting the idea that he's simply not smart enough to understand the reality of his proposal, then I have to accept the conclusion that he's being dishonest about his plan.

In the more than two years since his budget was unveiled, Ryan has not specified any tax breaks he would eliminate. Independent analyses have shown that offsetting the tax cuts would require changing things such as the mortgage interest deduction, the tax exclusion for employer-financed health insurance or other popular tax preferences widely used by middle-income households.

Why after two years hasn't Paul "Encyclopedia" Ryan shared any relevant details? If the problem isn't a lack of smarts, and it isn't a lack of knowledge, the only remaining possibility is a lack of candor. If he's smart enough to know what he's selling, he knows how much of it is snake oil.

Update: How would Romney's version of Ryan's plan balance the budget? In his own words, "We haven't run the numbers on that specific plan".

Looking for Proof of Intelligent Life in the Political World....

Sometimes political events bring to mind the classic Ronald Reagan SNL sketch, in which whenever cameras were rolling or members of the public were around he would play the part of an affable grandfather, but the moment they were gone he turned into an energetic, detail-driven dynamo. There was probably some truth to it, that we never got to see the "real" Ronald Reagan who was concealed by a carefully contrived cowboy persona. Whatever his actual behind-the-scenes persona, Reagan was comfortable with his public image.

A few decades later, G.W. Bush offered the public a similarly contrived public persona, that of a Texas rancher who liked to drive around in a pickup truck and clear brush in his spare time. No pictures of G.W. on horseback - to put it mildly, he was not that much of a rancher. And never mind that the ranch was purchased as a campaign prop and sold pretty much the minute G.W. retired from the White House. But the public image worked... to a degree.

Bush apparently chafed at the public's perception that he was not very bright. So, during his presidency he arranged for some meetings with authors and other prominent individuals in which he would attempt to wow them with his deep understanding of their work, before ushering them out to share the news of how brilliant he was. The principal tool appears to have been flattery - convince the participant in the meeting that the President had read their work, thought about it, compared it to other ideas, and found it compelling. Flattery will get you... a lot of places.

I suspect that the campaign didn't succeed - at least, not to the degree the White House had hoped. That is, although I do recall hearing a number of people, some of whom were unquestionably intelligent, claim that the President was very impressive in their meetings, the formula was pretty obvious. But more to the point, it raised the question of why a man who is so impressive in a controlled meeting behind closed doors demonstrated none of the same brilliance and insight in any other context.

All presidents have aspects of their personality that they would prefer to hide from the public, and often they are quite successful in managing their public images. No matter how it is created, once a public persona is firmly established it can be difficult to overcome. John McCain seemed like something of a maverick until he fully embraced G.W., and some who scrutinize his record question the extent to which the label ever truly fit, but the image was strong enough to carry him through his presidential campaign. At the time, the public would have been shocked by some of the behavior attributed to Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and while we now view Watergate as consistent with Nixon's personality, the Nixon you hear on tape is not the Nixon people thought they elected.

Negative images can stick, as well, which is no small part of the reason why political campaigns work so hard to tar opponents before they're known to the public. "Dukakis in a tank". Gerald Ford was probably less clumsy than the average president, but a few prominent incidents led to him being regarded as somewhat accident prone. Al Gore was not the dissembler that his detractors claim, but any number of myths persist about supposed false claims or exaggerations that made for good headlines but turned out to be misrepresentations of what Gore had actually said.

In G.W.'s case, it's difficult to believe that we were simply talking about stage management. That is, once his team made the decision to play up his intellect, it should have been possible to modify his public persona to better display his intellect. Once the decision was made to push his intellect, it should have been possible to demonstrate publicly what was reportedly being demonstrated in private. The fact that G.W.'s P.R. team failed in that effort suggests that the public persona was more genuine than what was going on in controlled, private meetings.

Here's the thing: Yes, the President and his team have enormous power to craft a public image and push that image forward. If it resonates with the public, it can be difficult to overcome, even with facts. By virtue of his intellectual incuriosity and desired "blue collar, man of the people", Bush was able to convince people that he was less intelligent than he actually was. But when he became uncomfortable with that persona, the public simply knew too much about him for him to take it to the other extreme. Had he settled for the middle, where by all appearances the truth most likely would have been found, he might have achieved at least that much.

In contrast with G.W. or Reagan, some candidates want to be seen as intelligent, even brilliant, and work to advance that perception. Sometimes they don't have to work very hard at it - our nation loves dynasties, business and political, and it also associates wealth with intelligence. So if you're rich and have a strong family name, you are 90% of the way to selling yourself as brilliant.

Even if you turn out to be Donald Trump, crass, boorish, prone to making absurd claims and statements, you are likely to maintain your reputation as a business genius simply by virtue of your claimed wealth, no matter how many failed ventures, bankruptcies and dubious licensing schemes you leave in your wake. Frankly, you can see why somebody like Trump would seethe at the "you didn't build that" misquote, because at this point there's little left to the myth behind his fortune - he looks like a narcissist of middling intelligence who learned the building trade (and got some very important connections) through his father, then got very lucky gambling with his inherited fortune.

But the fact is, when somebody is brilliant you can usually find evidence of that. Not in nebulous, Chauncey Gardener-type statements that require you to either defer to the speaker's brilliance or invite you to read into the statement the "brilliant" insight you are hoping to hear (yes, I'm talking about Alan Greenspan). But in documented, public actions, statements and writings that demonstrate the claimed level of intellect. When somebody tells you, in essence, "Trust me, when he's alone in private he says smart things," tell them, "I'll believe you when I hear the tape."

Rick Santorum's Inability to Articulate Good Policy

I recognize that I'm suddenly supposed to accept Rick Santorum as a serious candidate (just like every other bubble candidate who came before him), blame past coverage of his liabilities on unfair treatment by the media, and pretend that this time (just like every other time) he is resonating with the public not because voters are desperate for an alternative to Mitt Romney but because Santorum offers something that's truly different. Yeah, right.

Let's be honest for a moment: Mitt Romney's level of support has been pretty steady - not just in this campaign, but even in relation to five years ago. His level of support in Iowa were pretty much the same as it was four years ago. Other candidates have, for the most part, been able to obtain a much lower level of support from their respective bases, but have been sequentially buoyed by a series of bubbles. Each time we hear the same thing: This guy or gal could be the "real thing", and each time the bubble bursts - not because the media has previously been unfair to the candidate, but because the media has previously not taken the candidate seriously and thus spared him serious scrutiny.

The real difference this time is that those who really don't want Romney to get the nomination are out of options. They can pray for Rick Perry to have a miraculous comeback, they can pray for Rick Santorum to tread water long enough to keep Romney from locking up the nomination, they can even hope that Ron Paul continues to pull a significant "none of the above" vote, Ross Perot style, for a bit longer. But as much as some want to pretend that he's a serious, credible candidate, that "Tourette's Syndome" excuse is not going to carry the day, nor will he be able to credibly deny his more bizarre or inappropriate statements by claiming confusing followed up by dubious stories about what he "really said".

Some of Santorum's problems arise from the fact that, having not been taken seriously as a candidate, his past statements have not received much scrutiny. He's in the "success hasn't spoiled me yet" phase of his bubble - but he need look no further than Ron Paul to see whether his past statements and associations are likely to remain buried.

When you hear Santorum talk about foreign policy issues, it's clear that he doesn't understand foreign policy. It seems pretty clear as well that he doesn't understand the economy. So what does he understand? What's his saving grace? That he's a social conservative who opposes, in essence, feminism, reproductive freedom, equal rights for gay citizens, and... civil rights in general?

[Santorum] declared himself against individualism, against libertarianism, against “this whole idea of personal autonomy, . . . this idea that people should be left alone.” And in this 2005 TV interview, you can hear these classic hits: “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness . . . and it is harming America.”

Or as Jonathan Rauch observed,

Though he is a populist critic of Big Government, Santorum shows no interest in defining principled limits on political power. His first priority is to make government pro-family, not to make it small. He has no use for a constitutional (or, as far as one can tell, moral) right to privacy, which he regards as a "constitutional wrecking ball" that has become inimical to the very principle of the common good. Ditto for the notions of government neutrality and free expression. He does not support a ban on contraception, but he thinks the government has every right to impose one.

I don't think that Santorum is a stupid man - he seems to be slightly above average in his intelligence - but he's not a thoughtful man. Despite being a career politician and campaigner, he either has little interest in or little aptitude for understanding some pretty basic issues.

Consider his recent statement on Palestinians - that there are no Palestinians and the occupied territories are actually part of Israel. From a "pandering to a reactionary base" standpoint, such a statement may have seemed right to Santorum, but would he actually proceed with that as U.S. policy? Not if he understands anything about the conflict and the fact that Israel does not want to transform the Palestinian population of the West Bank into Israeli citizens. Has he completely missed the entire discussion of a two state solution, and why Israel does not want to annex the West Bank and Gaza along with their Palestinian populations? Apparently so, but how?

Consider his statements on the military - predictably he does not want gay people to be able to serve, but he couldn't stop there:

Asked by a YouTube questioner whether he would try to reverse the policy allowing gays to serve in the military, Santorum responded: “Any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military.”

In his longer answer, the former Pennsylvania senator clarified that his objection to repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was that it was an attempt to “inject social policy” into military policy.

When it comes to sex in uniform, Santorum said: “Keep it to yourself, whether you are heterosexual or homosexual.”

So it seems that Santorum wants our nation's soldiers to be celibate, and to give no hint to each other of their sexual interests, even if they're heterosexual. How can an anti-gay rights zealot like Santorum, who was in a position of national leadership during extensive debate of "don't ask, don't tell", be that clueless both about what it means, let alone think that you can expect enlisted personnel to be both celibate and completely discreet about their sexual preferences for their years of service.

As a guy who has made stupid comments in the past about gay marriage, leading to his so-called "Google problem", you would think he might have thought about what to say when the issue again, inevitably, arose. And apparently he did - but his new response is also vapid:

"Are we saying everyone should have the right to marry? So anyone can marry anyone else?" Santorum asked, according to a video by NBC News. "So anybody can marry several people?"

The former Pennsylvania senator was clearly on the defensive throughout the exchange, as he attempted to prevent the back-and-forth from becoming a free-for-all.

"We're going to have a civil discussion or were going to move on to another question," he said at one point. Confronted by one critic, he fired back, "What about three men?"

Clearly antagonized, Santorum continued, "If it makes three people happy to get married, based on what you just said, what makes that wrong and what you said right?"

While this time he didn't say that allowing gay marriage would be tantamount to "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." But he did suggest that gay marriage is tantamount to allowing polygamy and, as he's never retracted the prior statement, effectively added polygamy to his list of things that are like "man on child, man on dog". He makes no effort to explain how polygamy becomes inevitable from allowing gay marriage, or why it's not the inevitable result of straight marriage. We could put it like this: Would Santorum, himself, be lobbying for polygamy if gay marriage became the law of the land? If not, why not - and why doesn't he believe that most Americans would share his values and continue to insist that marriage is between two partners? No need to drag pets, kids, or third parties into it.

I recognize that the Republican Party tries to portray itself as a party of the average guy, with the candidate you would most like to drink a beer with, and that past would-be nominees, nominees, and even incumbent Presidents have played down their intelligence in order to better connect with the presumed Republican voter. But this is important: Santorum's not playing.

Update: I won't attempt to determine if Gail Collins is offering excerpts representative of Santorum's book, "It Takes a Family", or if she's picking his most absurd claims, but her examples highlight Santorum's intellectual mediocrity:

Santorum looks at Clinton’s village and sees something like the evil mountain in “Lord of the Rings.” Everything the liberal elders do is for the worst possible motives. They don’t want to legalize same-sex marriage so that gay couples can have the right to commit themselves permanently and legally to each other. The liberals/gays don’t believe in lifelong commitments! They only believe in “a kind of cohabitation,” where you can pack up and leave any time you like, and now they’re trying to impose that on the poor, monogamous peasants.

I would say that I would love to hear Santorum explain how laws that allow people enter what even he might acknowledge to be the bonds of matrimony are in fact designed to break down family relationships. Up is down, left is right,and all that. But I can't say that, because honestly, after seeing some of his prior attempts to defend his poorly considered positions I don't want to listen to Santorum.

Newt Gingrich's Intelligence - Hidden in Plain Sight?

I keep finding assertions that Newt Gingrich is a brilliant man. Brimming with insights and ideas. Except... I have yet to read an editorial, hear a speech, or see any other actual evidence of that brilliance. I'm not arguing that he's stupid - not at all - but what I see seems like a pretty run-of-the-mill intellect for a successful Washington politician. Above average, but nothing to write home about.

I'm fully prepared to buy into Newt as the intellectual giant of the GOP, but only if somebody shows me the evidence. I won't even ask that you explain away his many mistakes - smart people make mistakes, and sometimes can think their way into trouble. Arguably a stupid man would have an easier time staying on message in today's Republican Party, as I expect it's easier to stay on the right side of litmus tests if you don't have the aptitude to think about whether the positions you're supposed to take are in fact what's best for the nation.

I come across smart people all of the time, including people whose political philosophies vary from my own. Am I missing something? Or is it that I am to be awed by his ability to promote himself and rake in huge amounts of cash by serving as the Ed McMahon of right-wing political causes, and conclude that anybody so good at enriching himself has to be smart?

Is George Bush Stupid?

In the sense of having a low IQ? Of course not. Yet he chose a public persona that, going on two years after he left office, still has his former buddies defending him. Jamelle Bouie quotes Tony Blair's biography,

One of the most ludicrous caricatures of George is that he was a dumb idiot who stumbled into the presidency. No one stumbles into that job, and the history of American presidential campaigns is littered with the corpses of those who were supposed to be brilliant but who nonetheless failed because brilliance is not enough. [...]

To succeed in US politics, of that of the UK, you have to be more than clever. You have to be able to connect and you have to be able to articulate that connection in plain language. The plainness of the language then leads people to look past the brainpower involved. Reagan was clever. Thatcher was clever. And sometimes the very plainness touches something else: a simplicity that is the product of a decisive nature.

Bouie argues,

... decades from now, when the history of the Bush administration has been written, we'll find that George W. Bush suffered from passivity, indifference and incompetence, not stupidity or ignorance.

I can agree with that, except for the "ignorance" part. Bush ran his first campaign on an "ignorance is a virtue" platform. Recall that he didn't know who led Pakistan (or India), as if such an issue could have any real world relevance. He was going to delegate the egghead tasks to a bevy of highly qualified subordinates. His ignorance was pitched as something close to a virtue, making him a beer buddy as opposed to a pointy-headed whatever like Al Gore.

During his early years in office he developed a reputation as agreeing with the last person with whom he spoke. He was into his second term before he broke with those who helped form his early policies and opinions. Which is why people like John Bolton view his first term as a wondrous success and his second term as so problematic - Bush was smart enough to recognize that he had been led down the primrose path, and appears to have shut people like Bolton, Cheney and the neocons out of his decision-making process.

But enough of ignorance - we're talking intelligence here. And as I suggested several years ago, Bush had a carefully cultivated public persona that contributed to perceptions that he was stupid. Right down to the 'ranch' he purchased right before he started his campaign, and sold the moment he left office. Once you're retired, it seems that you're no longer have to pretend to like driving around in a pickup truck or cutting brush.

If there is one word that sums up George Bush's public persona, it's "nuclear". He consistently pronounced the word "nucular". His father knew how to pronounce the word, as did his brother. As did his advisers, Vice President, and speechwriters. And his mispronunciation of the word was a frequent subject of jokes. Even if you believe he didn't know how to pronounce the word, at a certain point you have to recognize he would have been aware of his mispronunciation. At that point was it arrogance - a refusal to admit that he could make a mistake - that kept him from correcting himself? Or was it because, all along, he knew the proper pronunciation but it was part of a carefully calculated public image?

Part of the issue here is that Bush never came across as what one would call a quick, accurate thinker. A typical leader of a political party in a parliamentary system must be a quick, accurate thinker, or he won't rise to the top of the party, let alone survive question period. But it is possible to be highly intelligent and to be a slow thinker. Think of a computer playing chess - how much time it can take for the computer to sift through every possible future move before picking the one most likely to lead to victory. An intelligent person can spend a lot of time identifying and sorting through possibilities. Sometimes, if you want quick decisions, it pays to be either less intelligent or (in Bush's case) less reflective.

Blair's comments about intelligence say something about that - he perceives himself as clever, but seems to concede that Gordon Brown was significantly smarter than he was - just not very clever. Blair benefited from our perception of an Brit who speaks the Queen's English - of course he's intelligent, just listen to him. This is the opposite side of the coin from Bush - of course he's a mediocre intellect, just listen to him. Truth be told, they probably operate at about the same intellectual level - in both cases significantly above average but significantly below genius. And yes, as a mutual admiration society, I'm sure they both enjoyed discussing their cleverness.

Blair's comments remind me of my sister's childhood taunt that she was "street smart" while I was "book smart". My sister is smarter than she gave herself credit for, but by the same token she was not what an outside observer would have deemed "street smart". But really, she was suggesting that she was somehow more clever than I was, and I'll grant that in some ways it was true. I'll similarly grant Blair's point that intelligence isn't enough for somebody to become President, and perhaps it can even be a detriment. Whether Bush came up with his persona by himself or in collaboration with Karl Rove, it was a clever gambit. But no matter how you slice it, Bush (like so many other people on Capital Hill) personifies the lament, "How can somebody so smart be so stupid?"

(Bush fans take note: At present the same question can be asked of Barack Obama.)

After All, It's Not An Insult

Reading David Bernstein's commentary, I can't rule out the possibility that he is genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. (There's no possibility that he would take offense at that, right?)

To be fair, perhaps he somehow missed the fact that, in our society, high intelligence is generally regarded as a positive attribute and low intelligence is generally regarded as a negative - perhaps he was brought up in an exceptional household that took no notice of intelligence, or viewed it as a negative. Perhaps he believes that comments about ethnicity and height, something that has a known genetic basis and that (at most) few would regard as directly correlated to genetic superiority, is truly analogous to comments about race and intelligence, despite the long history of overt racists arguing that the allegedly lesser intelligence and intellectual capacity various ethnic or racial groups demonstrates their "inferiority".

Such an... Insight

Why is it that the self-professed "smartest people in the room" often seem more tedious than insightful?

But Avatar replaces dreams with wish-fulfilment. It has shocks, but programmatically excludes surprises. From time to time, when the explosions were particularly soothing, I would take off my 3D glasses and look around the audience. The place was crammed. Their black plastic glasses all faced the front. Their hand moved mechanically to the ice-creams, the popcorn, and the nachos on their laps (£6.80 with a big tub of sugary drink for free). They thought they were seeing a lesson about ecology and the perils of greed.

Yes, Andrew. Everybody but you is a mindless drone, incapable of seeing the flaws of Avatar and absorbing the movie as if it's a deep parable, which no doubt is why yours is the first critical essay on the film (except for all the others). Thanks for sharing.

Thinking vs. Doing

Over at MedRants, rcentor has an interesting post,

We live in a society that has a love hate relationship with thinking. Geeks are chic, but usually at a distance. We rarely show intellectuals the respect they deserve.

We all want the benefits if great thinking, but I fear that most in our society do not really respect the thinkers. We clearly respect the doers.

Perhaps that is why fees for surgery and procedures exceed fees for thinking. Cognition makes one a nerd.

Needless to say, this emphasis on "doing" extends well beyond the world of medical reimbursement.

Of Presidents and IQ

Why the obsession with GW's IQ? For the past five years, there has been one feeble "analysis" after another intended to assure us that he's actually pretty bright. Whether it is the analysis of his SAT scores or, more recently, his Air Force Officer Qualifying Test score.

A friend of mine once commented that what he found surprising is that it is quite easy to tell when somebody is not as smart as you are, but it is a lot harder to tell when somebody is smarter than you are. That's not to say that you cannot identify a situational brilliance - most will concede that Stephen Hawking can outdo them in the field of theoretical physics. But there's another side to this - even with his physical limitations removed from the equation, few would thereby conclude that Stephen Hawking was highly qualified to be President.

That's not to say we don't want a smart president - we obviously do. And obviously a great number of Bush supporters are sufficiently obsessed with "proving" that their candidate is sufficiently smart that they pore over dusty academic records and apply mathematical formulae they, well, seemingly make up, to prognosticate that when Bush was at one young age or another his IQ was somewhere in the mid-120's. A respectable IQ, although probably not particularly remarkable for Capitol Hill, which (whether or not you like the way they apply their intelligence) has more than its fair share of bright people.

We can easily get past the "IQ is meaningless" argument - it is apparent that IQ is quite meaningful within a broad range of common contexts. Bush's IQ is extrapolated from his SAT score - what, then, should we make of Paul Allen's combined 160, or Bill Gates' combined 1590 SAT scores? Is it a mere coincidence that two men whose SAT scores were "perfect" and "near-perfect" are co-founders of Microsoft (even if we wouldn't necessarily want either as President)?

But IQ isn't everything. A person can have a very high IQ but lack the social skills or even the thinking skills which make the IQ relevant. A high IQ score, of itself, doesn't make you conscientious or motivated. Of itself, it doesn't make you honest or trustworthy. Of itself, it doesn't make you a good or creative thinker. Of itself, it doesn't make you realize what every truly "smart" person knows - that learning is a lifelong experience, and that you will never have all of the answers. That is, life answers more questions than answers - and that the more you learn, the more you realize you do not yet know. And, of course, the measure of few IQ points one way or another is more likely to tell you something about the test and its margin of error, or how tired or bored the subject was when tested, than it is to tell you about any given individual.

President Bush may well have an IQ in the mid-120's. But if he does, he doesn't apply it well. He gave up on the journey of learning a very long time ago, apparently before he even got to college, and in many ways his campaign is effectively centered on his concrete operational thinking patterns - those which make him so certain that he is right and so unwilling to reconsider his mistakes. His more intelligent supporters who recognize these patterns - and recognize that they are indicative of a lower intelligence - obsess over proving he is "smart". And they keep going back to the same tired issue, over and over, because they know that Bush's public statements suggest that by Capitol Hill standards, whatever his IQ, Bush is at best a middling intellect.

Those supporters should remember two things. The reason that candidates like Clinton, Gore and Kerry aren't defensive about their intelligence is that they are confident of their intelligence - and their supporters share that comfort. And they should also remember that bragging that your friend is a few IQ points, or a few percentage points, higher than somebody else is a playground taunt, without any real world significance.