Intelligent Enough to Be President?

Vox assembles a case which has some force.

Few have ever been under any illusion that John McCain was a particularly brilliant individual. He graduated towards the bottom of his Naval Academy class, 894th out of 899, but then, one has to be quite intelligent to get into the Naval Academy in the first place, even as a legacy with heavy hitters behind you. And once one is in, one has to have the intellectual firepower to survive there; the heavy hitters don't do a plebe any good once he's at Annapolis.

Actually, McCain's IQ has been made public. It's 133, putting him in the top 5% or so of the population.

Ivy League institutions, on the other hand, have been practicing aggressive affirmative action for decades. If Yale and Harvard degrees aren't enough to protect George Bush, with his 1206 SAT, from accusations of stupidity, Columbia and Harvard degrees can't be sufficient to protect Obama from the same, especially in light of the suspicious way in which his test scores are mysteriously unavailable to the public.

A combined 1206 on the SATs is not spectacular, although it deserves attention. That was earned quite a while back, before allegations that the SATs had been 'dumbed down' a bit.

What's with the "unavailability" of Obama's scores, by the way?

Obama isn't articulate, in fact, he's actually worse than George w. Bush, who has impressive elocution issues. It's becomingly increasingly obvious that Obama is thin-skinned and petty; his response to the poorly-targeted attacks on Palin and McCain has not been to stop and rethink his failed strategy, but rather to amp up the volume. His campaign is committing weekly self-disembowelments, the most recent being an attempt to completely turn off all the elderly voters - the most reliable voters in the electorate - by accusing John McCain of not knowing how to email. Setting aside the total tactical pointlessness of an attack that is at best meaningless to anyone who isn't a 15-year old girl, it also reveals a total failure to do even the most elementary research considering that McCain has a pretty good excuse for not using email - he can't type due to the torture he received in Vietnam.

Not to mention O's return to the race-card and 'abortion first' themes immediately following Palin's nomination.

It seems that the O campaign (if not O personally) has managed to make its target audience smaller every week, which seems counter-intuitive in a Presidential race, not to mention a Congressional race.