I’ve taken to calling Obama “Obumbles” because it infuriates my liberal friends. Liberals have an emotional need to believe they are the smartest people in the room, so causally accusing their hero of being a dimwit offends them greatly. It is the hangover from the “scientific socialism” days when the Left swore their preferred arrangements were the natural order. In a better time, true believers would justify their actions by claiming they were doing God’s will. Today, Progressive fanatics believe reason is on their side.

Anyway, this article by Kevin Williamson touches on that a bit. Obama is supposed to be the smartest man in the room. He may have an above average IQ, I don’t know. Steve Sailer thinks his test scores were probably high average at worst and most likely above average. That’s not enough, of course. The Unibomber was a genius. Mao was probably genius or at least very shrewd. Personality is the hand that wields IQ. In the case of Obama, the personality is one that is disinterested and lazy.

It is not simply the content of his political agenda, which, though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President Obama does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much less to implement them. This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.

I would add that Obama is emblematic of the modern meritocracy. Accumulating credentials stands in place of accumulating accomplishments. Starting a business takes courage. Making it successful is hard work. Getting an MBA is relatively easy and it pays much better. The result is we have a lot of MBA-toting people who cannot run a lemonade stand and a shortage of honest entrepreneurs. A fair number of those credentialed professionals could never run a small business or dare try to start one.

That’s one side effect of managerialism. Getting credentials is a straight forward process with fairly clear instructions. If you have above average test scores, it means going to a good college and doing what you are told for four years. This opens the doors to elite society. Since the number of people meeting the minimum threshold exceeds the number of seats, the meritocracy quickly becomes a game of who you know and how to game the system. The result is a lot of credentialed idiots running around elite society.

Maybe that is self-correcting or maybe it does not matter. How much damage does a John Kerry really cause? Obama is president and he has proven to be fairly harmless. The bigger issue is that the ruling class, which depends on the ranks of the managerial class for talent, because incredibly narrow. The strivers at the bottom are motivated to emulate the people at the top, because that appears to be the path to success. Over time, the diversity of thought falls to zero. Everyone thinks and says the same things.

This happened with the Chinese exam system. Initially, it was a great way to find and cultivate talent. In time, the people entering the system saw that emulating those in the system was the golden ticket. The reason is the people in the system selected for people who would reinforce their position within the system. A few spins of this wheel and the imperial administration was staffed with men who only knew esoteric stuff like lines from old poetry and calligraphy. Something similar is happening to America.