David Thomson and dirigible:
“Where did this strange idea come from that Obama is smart?”
Neither you two nor Hugh Hewitt do yourselves or the conservative movement any good when you refuse to acknowledge the obvious. Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude, meaning, by definition, he was among the best of the very best of the student body. Harvard is any rational measure, one of the five best law schools in the country, along some mixture of with U. Chicago, Yale, Stanford, U.Va., Michigan. It was “good enough” a school that with Breyer, Souter, Scalia, Kennedy and Roberts, Harvard law grads represent a majority of the current Supreme Court and, dare I say, have had a disproportionate influence on American law for the last 200 years.
Obama, by dint of his academic performance (not to mention years as a respected professor of con law at a top five law school) places himself well in the thick of the most elite legal community: they know it, he knows it, and deep down inside, you know it, too.
For those of you who refuse to acknowledge the reality of his quite obvious high intelligence, you are either ill-informed and ignorant, or you are being intentionally obtuse. Indeed, I seem to recall that their respective scholarship at Harvard was SO IMPORTANT when John Roberts and Sam Alito were under consideration for the high court; your refusal to acknowledge the same with Obama, a graduate of the same damn school with the same damn grades, simply undercuts any shred of credibility you might want to have before commenting on such issues. Or it discloses some OTHER bias (*ahem*) that I will not address here.
