OPINION:
How many recall the eight years of George W. Bush’s two terms in office, during which he was derided constantly as being too dumb to be president? He was deemed “a frat boy,” and yet Mr. Bush had graduated from Yale University and had gone on to secure a master’s degree from Harvard Business School. When his grades were compared to those of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry during Mr. Bush’s campaign for re-election, it turned out the president had higher scores.
We can’t compare Barack Obama’s grades to Mr. Bush’s or anyone else’s because they and other indicators of his scholastic achievements have been hidden from public review.
This is not, however, a defense of Mr. Bush. This is about a question millions of Americans are beginning to ask: Is President Obama just a moron?
When I use the term, it should be noted that we have had presidents in the past who had impressive scholastic records but still turned out to be dumber than your average pea-picker and ridge-runner.
Woodrow Wilson took office after a distinguished career in academia and had been the governor of New Jersey. It was Wilson who embraced the income tax and turned out to be astonishingly naive about international affairs despite having helped the allies win World War I. Jimmy Carter, on paper, was no dummy. A graduate of the Naval Academy, he had been governor of Georgia, but as president, he was a dismal failure.
In early 2009, I wrote a commentary, “Putting a child in charge,” suggesting that having a young president - Mr. Obama was 47 at the time - in charge of the greatest economic and military power in the world might not be a good idea. I noted that Mr. Obama’s resume was unusually thin in terms of any real achievement. His main claim was that he had been a community organizer in Chicago. Politically, he was known best as a state senator for having voted “present” much of the time, and he had barely spent any time in the U.S. Senate before beginning to run for president.
It’s not as if he didn’t signal what he actually thought. “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.” Huh? When did we ever care what other nations thought about our driving or eating or the setting on our thermostats?
Michelle was scary, too. “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual - uninvolved, uninformed.”
Not that far into his first 20 months in office, the independent Tea Party movement erupted all over the nation, and it wasn’t because hundreds of thousands of Americans were uninvolved or uninformed. The problem was that a million of them had journeyed earlier to Washington to protest against passage of the disastrous Obamacare “reforms” only to be dismissed by the White House as “wrong.”
Americans took notice of all the tax cheats and various loonies nominated to be in Mr. Obama’s Cabinet, many of whom had to withdraw from consideration, one who became secretary of the Treasury and dozens who went on to become “czars” without any vetting from Congress.
So far, the guidance offered by Mr. Obama’s initial choices as economic advisers has driven up the deficit to historic highs and done nothing to reduce unemployment. So, as Mrs. Obama says, her husband will require you to work - just as soon as he figures out where real jobs come from.
The president just admitted that he was unaware there were no “shovel-ready” projects for a huge infusion of government funding, and yet he used that phrase over and over again while stumping for his failed “stimulus” program. Even the mayor of a small city could have told him that, but Mr. Obama had never run so much as a lemonade stand before being elected president.
At this point, Mr. Obama has spent more time playing golf in just less than two years in office than Mr. Bush spent during his entire eight years. He does so mostly on Sundays and was noticeably missing from any church attendance until people began to think he was a Muslim.
As the midterms approach, key members of his administration have headed to the exit doors, including his aforementioned economic advisers, a national security adviser and his chief of staff. The man credited with getting him elected, David Axelrod, will quit soon to help shape his campaign for re-election, if, that is, Democrats are stupid enough to nominate him again.
Famously, Americans early on realized that Mr. Obama could not deliver a speech without having teleprompters and, when called upon to speak without them, became a mass of stuttering, sputtering, sentence-splitting incoherence.
If that weren’t bad enough, Mr. Obama demonstrated an ability to insult whole nations while, at the same time, apologizing to the world for America’s exceptionalism and achievements.
He sent back a bust of Churchill to the British consulate, and his gift to then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a box of 25 DVDs, all in a format that would not work in the United Kingdom. He gave the queen an iPod preloaded with 40 show tunes.
Since being elected, he has insulted Wall Street, insurance companies, physicians, the president of France, Las Vegas, the Postal Service, Nancy Reagan and, lately, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Mostly, though, he has insulted the intelligence of millions of Americans, many of whom will be going to the polls on Nov. 2 to let him know they think he is a moron and among the worst, if not the worst, president ever to have held that office.
Alan Caruba blogs at factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com and is the founder of the National Anxiety Center.
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