Tokyo Phone Book

Even if you're the president and you've made it through Harvard and the Chicago political machine, you'd still be intimidated if someone dropped a document bigger than the Tokyo phone book on your desk - along with the task of presenting it to 200 million people. 

Good thing the desk is built from the aged wood of the HMS Resolute.  Because there are other issues weighing down upon it like glacial paperweights. 

The global war on terror.  Healthcare reform.  Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea. The H1N1 pandemic. And of course all of these issues are overshadowed by an economic meltdown and a war in Afghanistan that looks more like Southeast Asia every day.

It's a good thing Barack Obama is a pretty smart Harvard graduate. 

Or is it?  How much raw intelligence is needed to be a good president?  Does being smart make you a better president?   Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar with an IQ of 182.  And, while Dwight Eisenhower was criticized publicly for appearing fairly dim, he was known by insiders to be highly intelligent.  After all, he helped coordinate the allied invasion and liberation of France.  Abraham Lincoln's genius included writing the Ghettysburg address as a spur-of-the-moment thing just before the ceremony.  And Calvin Coolidge translated Dante for fun. 

"That we should expect smarter Presidents to serve us better may seem unlikely, though, judging from the historical record.  While some intensely bright men such as Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln enjoyed success in office, others experienced major difficulties, such as Nixon, Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, Taft, James Madison, and John Adams," says Steve Salier. 

"Still, this doesn't mean that IQ is not desirable in a President, all else being equal. The problem is that all else is not equal.  There are so few people at the far right end of the IQ bell curve that you can't always find amongst them all the other Presidential talents you need."

Hmm, meaning you could be exceptionally bright and motivated and still not be considered successful.  Nixon was said to have scored a 142 on his IQ test.  But John Kennedy had the intangibles - charisma, good looks, wealth, and a family of political fixers.  JFK was a 119. 

But can someone be too smart to be an effective president?  Writer Jerry Pournelle says, "We have always known that the brightest do not make the best military officers. There is a minimum, but go too high and you get problems.  This is standard thinking."   Long-standing military approach prescribes that if a leader is more than 30 IQ points smarter than his charges, he will have trouble commanding and communicating.

I don't know if our president's IQ is high - or high enough.  But do you think you could read the health care bill tonight - all 1,017 pages - and be ready for a meeting with Israel in the morning?  That's probably what he's doing tonight.