Obama Shows His Smarts
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on November 28th, 2008 5:28 am by HL
Obama Shows His Smarts
WASHINGTON — When I started covering the White House, more than 50 years ago, I believed that the smarter a president was, the better he would be. That was wrong. Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan were certainly not intellectuals, but they grasped the power of the presidency and they knew how to impose their agendas on their political partners and rivals. By contrast, Jimmy Carter was a whiz at policy analysis and Bill Clinton grasped the connections among issues almost intuitively. Yet neither one of them was able to leave the White House with a record of great achievements.