The intelligence question

Frum, Noonan, Parker, Powell, Edelman, Buckley: go read this:

Apparently, the skill most highly prized in a President is articulateness in extemporaneous public speaking. In fact, it is so highly prized, it is considered a necessary condition to assume the Presidency, and probably even a sufficient one.

…Sarah is just not articulate. It took her 11 sentences to say teachers should be paid more. Barack Obama could have done that in as few as eight sentences, with perhaps as few as five of them being about himself, and with much better tense agreement and with zero doggone-its. (But he might have mentioned his grandmother.)

…Unlike Sarah, who took 11 sentences to say teachers should be paid more, Joe took only nine sentences (by my count) to make multiple untrue statements and to express his view against elections in the West Bank. That efficiency of language is a hallmark of smart people.

You see? Sarah is not articulate enough to be President. Her experience in elected office, her experience in executive elected office, her being in honor societies in both high school and college, her being repeatedly encouraged to take on leadership roles by her peers, her successes as objectively measured -- none of that matters. She just sounds a little too, um, low class and a little too, uh, religious. She isn't a lawyer. And she hasn't even written an autobiography yet!

You know, I think it's probably you guys that are not so smart. Sometimes, I interview a job candidate and don't want to him him because he "doesn't even know what he doesn't know." This kind of person is dangerous because they don't understand how much damage they can do:

It's more important that an ignorant executive be cautious than decisive. On that score, Palin is the only candidate in either ticket that seems even mildly conscious of her own ignorance. When foundering in ignorance, Obama reverts to platitudes, Biden makes stuff up, McCain suspends his campaign, and Palin asks for clarification.

And this, really captures my opinion about the election. Remember, I'm not a big fan of McCain:

But really, isn't the intelligence debate a little silly? No matter how intelligent a person is, it would be impossible to master every subject and every issue that a President would face in his term of office. The range of knoweldge is simply too diverse. That's why a President has advisors, experts in specific fields who offer advice and counsel.

Identifying those experts and weighing their counsel is the primary job of a President. And those decisions are the primary product of the President's principles. Those principles are much more important to the health of the nation than the President's college grades, SAT scores, or oratorical skills.

The question in this election, as in every other, is whose principles (to the extent they are identifiable or consistent) are better?

Where McCain has identifieable or consistent principles they seem to be a mish-mash of fuzzy and indistinct notions like Western American independence, anti-intellectual populism, and the virtue of stubborness--with a smattering (but just) of limited government federalist republicanism.

Obama's principles, where they're identifiable, are more coherent. Obama appears to be a fairly straightforward progressive. He's adamantly redistributionist, authoritarian, statist and anti-republican.

For me, the true test of principles are the extent to which they actually make life better, as opposed to the extent to which they claim to make life better. The extent to which principles are grounded in reality is the extent to which they are good principles. The extent to which principles hie to abstractions and float freely detached from reality is the extent to which they're not only wrong, but actively counter-productive.

In McCain's case, because his principles are sort of haphazardly assembled and largely incoherent, the chance that he'd actually apply good, effective principles as President is essentially random. In Obama's case, that chance is even smaller. While Obama's principles are coherent and largely consistent, they're also almost entirely wrong.

So that's our choice. It's not a choice between Goofus and Gallant, or between Change and Different Change, or between smart and dumb. Our choice is between random and wrong.

Just a little kicker: