How smart is Obama?

I can't deny that this article, "How Stupid is Obama," has a disrespectful title (and to an extent, the tone matches), but I also can't find much in it with which to disagree.

It is interesting that Obama's grades and academic history at Columbia and Harvard are nearly a complete mystery. I wonder how Obama would fare if all the products and records of his college days were subjected to the same scrutiny given Sarah Palin's emails. Or, comparing apples to apples, I wonder how Obama's emails as state and U.S. Senator would compare to Palin's emails.

It is very odd that there are no teams of citizens and journalists poring over those.

A lot of the comments on the above article debate whether Obama's actions are due to stupidity or ideology.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are many educated, high-IQ people who are proponents of Keynesian economics and socialist, redistributionist leftist policies. However, despite their intelligence, there must necessarily be a strong thread of "stupid" running through the brains of anyone who supports these destructive policies. There's nothing shocking about that -- I work with many Ph.D.'s in my profession. They are clearly highly intelligent people, but they are capable of impressively stupid behavior outside their areas of expertise.

What is really impressive, and sadly common, are intelligent people who are persistently stupid within their supposed areas of expertise. They may have an impression command of individual facts, but they arrange those facts in a wholly fictitious narrative. Being intelligent doesn't prevent you from having enormous blind spots in your world-view that are created by your upbringing and education.

One of the most pernicious and persistent base assumptions of the left is that people are, by default morally neutral, or even good, and that deviations from accepted morality can be corrected by state action. The state can make you eat better, manage your health care better, plan for your retirement better, and direct your charitable contributions better than you can yourself: if you disagree with the state choices, you are mistaken, and if you agree with the state choices, well, then you should be happy they're saving you the trouble of managing it all yourself!

I think the individualist film "Serenity" captures it well in two brief sections of dialog:

River Tam: "People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome."

Capt. Malcom Reynolds: "Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."