Is Smart Enough?
At her confirmation yesterday, Hillary Clinton invoked the concept of “smart power” as a guide to American diplomacy.
In his hearings, Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited Barack Obama as a role model for America’s school children. “Never before,” he said “has being smart been so cool.”
And in another hearing room, Senators were mooning over Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, the nominee for Energy Secretary. Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman enthused over Chu’s “insight and vision” to carry out Obama’s energy policies.
But is brilliance alone the panacea for all of America’s problems? With the possible exception of the Defense Department’s Douglas Feith, characterized as the “dumbest effing guy on the planet’ by Gen.Tommy Franks, Bush’s Neo-Cons were not stupid but blinkered in their perception of how the world works and too arrogant to learn from their mistakes.
The test for all that Obama brainpower will be to avoid replicating the record of JFK’s “The Best and the Brightest” whose tunnel vision led to quagmire in Vietnam as surely as the Neo-Cons confidently took us into Iraq disaster and, back home, free-market ruin.
“It doesn’t help,” Nicholas Kristof wrote recently, “that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas.”
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ChrisWWW
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DLS
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DLS
