Do any of the GOP candidates have the IQ to be President?

[_Morley]

It might end up being Newt. Never underestimate many of the GOP's fundamental distaste for Romney.

[_moksha]

I remember some years ago when Newt advocated taking children away from their single mothers and sending them to Boy's Town. I think Newt's reasoning was, that if Father Flannigan and the boys could help shape up a shiftless youth like Mickey Rooney, then it would work as a universal panacea and turn out future contributors to GOPac.

Who said the Republican candidate slate was devoid of visionaries? They only need to scrutinize Newt for fantasies that will take them far and wide.

[_moksha]

Jon? Yes, but has no chance of being nominated. Too intelligent.

Governor Jon Huntsman is so out of touch with his own party. Imagine trying to seek the Republican nomination and then announcing that he believed in science. What was he thinking?!!! He sounds like some Canadian politician.

[_Dr. Shades]

[Ron Paul] has no chance of winning the nomination, though. . . As it is, he's not in the equation.

Why do you think that is?

[_Quasimodo]

[Ron Paul] has no chance of winning the nomination, though. . . As it is, he's not in the equation.

Why do you think that is?

That's a pretty good question. I guess that most Republicans find that some of his views don't follow conventional Republican lines. His foreign policy ideas and his views on legalizing drugs seem to put off many conservatives.

He ran in a similar situation in the 2008 primaries. He just doesn't seem to be able to break out of his low poll numbers.

[_Droopy]

I don't know where to start. My guess is that it would be a waste of time, anyway.

Yes, it would be an utter waste of time you you to attempt intellectually serious discussion of politics with the intellectually serious. Bow out now and save yourself the embarrassment.

The RNC candidates (for the most part) are even dimmer than George W.

What this indicates is that serious discussion of the issues of the day with you is now settled as an exercise in futility.

Tear up your voting registration card, quasi, you're a danger to a free, self governing society.

[_Quasimodo]

I don't know where to start. My guess is that it would be a waste of time, anyway.

Yes, it would be an utter waste of time you you to attempt intellectually serious discussion of politics with the intellectually serious. Bow out now and save yourself the embarrassment.

The RNC candidates (for the most part) are even dimmer than George W.

What this indicates is that serious discussion of the issues of the day with you is now settled as an exercise in futility.

Tear up your voting registration card, quasi, you're a danger to a free, self governing society.

LOL! You're such a twit. An amusing twit, but a twit never the less. You would rather make silly insults than engage in a reasonable conversation. Please, address someone else and allow me my own opinion.

[_Molok]

Ron Paul has the necessary I.Q.

He also appears, to me, to be the candidate whose ideology most closely resembles that of the Founding Fathers.

He wants to murder native americans and exploit their land for natural resources?

[_richardMdBorn]

Does Obama have the IQ to be President? No I was going to recount examples of his ignorance but Victor Davis Hanson has already cited some of them in a recent column

Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who will ever know?) But even today’s inflated version of yesteryear’s gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal article? Why not?

I ask not because I particularly care about the GPAs or certificates of the president, but only because I am searching for a shred of evidence to substantiate this image of singular intellectual power and known erudition. For now, I don’t see any difference between Bush’s Yale/Harvard MBA record and Obama’s Columbia/Harvard Law record — except Bush, in self-deprecation, laughed at his quite public C+/B- accomplishments that he implied were in line with his occasional gaffes, while Obama has quarantined his transcripts and relied on the media to assert that his own versions of “nucular” moments were not moments of embarrassment at all.

At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a part-time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator, Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?

That his brilliance is a myth was not just revealed by the weekly lapses (whether phonetic [corpse-man], or cultural [Austria/Germany, the United Kingdom/England, Memorial Day/Veterans Day] or inane [57 states]), but in matters of common sense and basic history. The error-ridden Cairo speech was foolish; the serial appeasement of Iran revealed an ignorance of human nature; a two-minute glance at an etiquette book would have nixed the bowing or the cheap gifts to the UK.

In short, the myth of Obama’s brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well. Read Plato’s Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and wisdom — and Socrates’ warning about easily conflating the two. It need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book, and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed. Obama seems never to have done that. He liked the vague idea of Obamacare, outsourced the details to the Democratic Congress, applied his Chicago protocols to getting it passed, and worried little what was actually in the bill. We were to think that the obsessions with the NBA, the NCAA final four, the golfing tics, etc., were all respites from exhausting labors of the mind rather than in fact the presidency respites from all the former.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/