Wesley Clark and the curse of intelligence
Mike Martz, the head coach of the St. Louis Rams, is widely considered to be one of the smartest men in the National Football League. He is the architect of The Greatest Show on Turf - an explosive offense that set numerous records for offensive production - and the word "genius" frequently appears in the same sentence with his name.
His team, however, has again fallen short of its Super Bowl expectations, mostly because the brilliant coach made a boneheaded decision that shocked even beer-befuddled couch potatoes across the country, only the latest in a series of inexplicably bad decisions that have cost the Rams dearly over the last three years.
John Madden, on the other hand, is hardly known for his acumen. His butcheries of the English language are legendary - "few yards are better than none yards" - but he has the diamond-encrusted ring that has so far eluded Mike Martz. And few would argue that Madden's Raiders had more talent than Martz's Rams. So, how is this possible?
The truth is intelligence is not synonymous with success. A certain amount can be very helpful, to be sure, but beyond a certain point, the ability to see diverse possibilities starts to become a hindrance. It is much easier to weigh the odds of three or four options than it is to balance 10 or 12, and it takes less time, too. As data gathering and processing capability increases, the ability to focus and ignore unwanted information becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, there is a tendency to become either paralyzed with doubt or divorced from reality as one gets lost in elaborate probability models.
George Bush is cut from the John Madden mold. He is not a stupid man - his estimated 125 IQ puts him well above the norm - but he is by no means brilliant. Like JFK, who is known to have had an IQ of 119, he has an ability to focus on the actual situation at hand, even if he does not have a gift for beautifully articulating it.
Smart politicians such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Richard Nixon, whose IQs come in at 137, 140 and 143, respectively, have for the most part been failures at the highest level. Their ability to incorporate information also gives them a strong tendency to micromanage, which is a disastrous characteristic for any executive. Note that Jimmy Carter, an unsuccessful president by any standard, was the most intelligent president of the modern era.
There is another danger, too, for the intelligent presidential candidate. To the average man, one of the great mysteries of life is how brilliant academics can be so reliably stupid. This is because there appears to be a strong correlation between one's level of intelligence and the importance one places on the abstract as opposed to quotidian reality. Thus, a brilliant Marxian economist can dismiss a century of total socialist failure with a wave of the hand, because none of the historical real-world applications precisely matches the theoretical vision in his head.
Both leading Democratic candidates appear to be highly intelligent men. Howard Dean is a doctor; Wesley Clark is a Rhodes Scholar. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that both men are more wedded to their abstract internal visions of the world than how it actually operates according to objective reality. This is how Gen. Clark can make bizarre statements about a European right of first refusal on American national security and Howard Dean can believe that raising taxes is good for the economy despite two millennia of evidence to the contrary.
Neither man makes any sense to the logical observer, but that is unimportant. It makes sense in some ideal place in their heads, and for such men, that is all that matters.
Based on the two men's comments over the last few months, I am quite sure that Wesley Clark is the most intelligent of the candidates for the Democratic Party nomination. He has said almost nothing capable of withstanding even the most cursory analysis, and his globalist view of the world appears to have more in common with Star Trek than with what history suggests is a Hobbesian free-for-all of ambitious, power-hungry men wrestling for wealth and influence. More than most, Gen. Clark appears to suffer from the curse of intelligence. America would do well to avoid him.