Thanks to Cary for this little gem.
The Most Powerful Man on Earth (10/04)
By Sam Harris
In his first inaugural address Thomas Jefferson openly doubted his fitness for the presidency, saying “the task is above my talents, and I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire.” Two centuries later, the charge of the presidency has grown all the greater, and yet one suspects that the current [office holder] has never felt much in the way of anxious and awful presentiments. Throughout the [last election], President Bush assure[d] us that his talents [were] equal to his responsibilities and that he[was] the best man for the job. These claims invite scrutiny.
President Bush gives every appearance of being a man of average intelligence. Define intelligence any way you like, President Bush seems to have his fair share of it, but no more. I doubt there is a person alive who believes that he is among the most intelligent men in Washington or that he was the most intelligent candidate for the presidency in 2004. While no one expects that even the most gifted president will author all his public utterances, it is nice to believe that he might have authored them, if he had the time. Hearing President Bush speak from a prepared text, one often has the uncanny sense that he could not possibly be the source of these thoughts.
We should note that there is nothing wrong with being of average intelligence. There is something wrong with a system that promotes such men to positions of extraordinary power. Nothing about our current method of vetting our presidential candidates ensures that they will even be well informed. Even a barber must pass an exam in our country, and yet the person into whose hands we place the very tiller of civilization is not expected to know anything in particular before setting to work.
It is often said that many Americans take comfort in Bush’s being "just like them." This seems an odd quality to admire in a man whose choices determine the fates of nations. What mother would be gratified to learn that the surgeon performing an operation on her child is “just like her” in not knowing much about the vasculature of the human body? What airline passenger would relish the fact that his “plainspoken” pilot graduated near the bottom of his class? Clearly, the president of the United States bears more responsibility than either of these. But what does President Bush know about economic policy, military strategy, international law, environmental science, the tenets of Islam, or any of a dozen other disciplines relevant to his office?
Nowhere have President Bush’s intellectual deficits been more evident than in the area foreign policy. What we need now is a president who can unite the world against its common enemies. We need a president who can communicate persuasively and extemporaneously about the threat that militant Islam poses to everyone, Muslims included; instead, we have a president who is visibly afraid to wander beyond his talking points. It is a truism to say that President Bush does not speak well about the nuances of our policies, and there is no reason to believe that he thinks better than he speaks. We have lost our allies, not merely for what we have done in the aftermath of September 11th but for our failure to persuade them that we are all at war with a totalitarian and theocratic movement in the Muslim world that is incompatible with civil society.
We need a president who can take us to war for ten reasons, rather than one, and who can convince our allies that these reasons are valid. It is horrible to consider that President Bush’s fixation upon weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even in their absence, has been a symptom of his rhetorical inability. Whatever your politics, there was a case to be made for our invasion of Iraq, but President Bush did not make that case. Our humanitarian purposes in Iraq seem an afterthought to our allies because they were an afterthought to our president. We stand convicted of fighting a war on false pretexts. In the eyes of most of the world, the United States is now a rogue power—imperialist and inarticulate. President Bush is largely to blame for this. But we are to blame for electing him. It is time that we recognized that his fumbling, his non-sequiturs, and his startling inability to speak at length about the details of policy are a problem for our democracy, and for the world. These traits—so natural in an ordinary man—are simply terrifying in the most powerful man on earth.
