America's IQ Test in November

Next January either Barack Obama or John McCain will be the 44th President of the United States. If Obama is elected, there is a reasonable chance the country will make progress toward modernity and sustainable prosperity over the ensuing four years. If McCain is elected, there is a reasonable chance the country will enter a period of irremediable decline.

One measure of intelligence, and probably a particularly relevant one, is the way a human behaves when confronted with an environment of limited knowledge and uncertain outcomes. The more adept a person is at synthesizing data into relevant combinations and working with that information in a creative way (meaning, as one definition, the ability to see previously unanticipated combinations among such data sets), the better such a person will perform in the face of uncertainty. This is the kind of person we need presently as chief executive: a smart and creative person who can absorb information quickly, see pathways toward results and organize resources to get there. I think this is the kind of person Barack Obama is.

His contest with Hillary Clinton should never have been close. She was the presumptive nominee with an established, wealthy political machine at her disposal and the all-important air of inevitability. Big Media had preordained her coronation. The observation that the primary race has been close or that Hillary won overwhelmingly in the white trailer-home demographic
misses the point entirely. A reasonably good showing by Barack would have been amazing; instead, he kicked Hillary and Bill Clinton's ass up one side of the street and down the other. That's a simple fact. He accomplished this feat because (a) he's a born winner and (b) because he's smart as hell. He put together a political organization that took advantage of modern technology, i.e., the Internet, and cast the tenor of his campaign in terms of youthful reinvigoration of the country, which everyone knows we need.

John Sidney McCain, on the other hand, is another aging dumb white guy with anger management issues. I think we've just concluded the experiment on how that works in terms of keeping America competitive and modern in the 21st Century world. There is absolutely nothing special about him. A child of privilege, the son and grandson of Admirals in the U.S. Navy, he attended the Episcopal School outside Washington D.C. and then his father secured a place for him at the Naval Academy, not too far away in Annapolis. In a class of 899, McCain graduated in 894th position. This is an important point and not some casually observed calumny. He's a goof-off, a glad-hander, a back-slapper, a guy who regales the country club set with his tales of derring-do in the Vietnam War. He retired from the Navy at the age of 44 and immediately went to Congress. He has no background in anything other than flying a jet and politics (and beer distribution), and no advanced degrees in any discipline. We should believe him when he says he doesn't know anything about economics. He reportedly called George W. Bush "dumb as a stump" in one offhand assessment a few years back. No, George W. Bush is not dumb; but this was a case of a door knob calling the stump dense. McCain thinks that the Sunni al-Qaeda would go to Tehran, seat of a Shiite theocracy, for training and support. And terrorism is his signature issue?

McCain has no new ideas. He talks about the United States in strictly militaristic terms. Here's an interesting observation from Dmitry Orlov's book op.cit. about the U.S. military in the modern world: "Russia has scaled back defense spending considerably after the Soviet collapse, but the defense spending of the United States has kept growing like a tumor and is on course to match and surpass what the rest of the world spends on defense. While one might naively assume that the rest of the world is quivering before such overwhelming military might, nothing of the sort is occurring." Orlov points out that the U.S. has never bombed or invaded any nation formerly within the Warsaw Pact. That's because we can't; we can't attack any country with nuclear weapons nor use our conventional army against such a country. A big conventional army may make us feel secure, and it's useful for fighting useless wars, such as McCain's current favorite, Iraq. But it can't make us secure. If it could, why did 9-11 happen? Al-Qaeda succeeded on 9-11 because we had incompetent, out-of-it guys (and a gal) running the government, although don't take my word for it, consider the words of the House Senate Joint Inquiry Report, Findings & Conclusions: "For a variety of reasons, the Intelligence Community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant to the events of September 11. As a result, the Community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."

When you read the 9-11 Commission information, including the Congressional Report cited above, you realize the CIA and FBI actually did a pretty damn good job. It wasn't a case of needing more aircraft carriers; it was trying to get someone at the White House, other than Richard Clarke, to pay attention to what the agencies were finding.

John McCain is not convinced that the $1 trillion we spend annually on defense, wars, intelligence and security is enough. We should keep building our Maginot Line and other World War II relics to make ourselves feel safe. This isn't going to help. We need to be smarter using what we already have. We can't disregard the $10 trillion national debt the next president will inherit, the lack of modern mass transporation, the antiquated and soon-to-be obsolete energy paradigm on which the entire economy is based, the quivering entitlement programs. It's not a time to just keep going with the same old, dumb, out-to-lunch ideas and see what happens.

Give me the smart guy. Give me the kid from the broken home and mixed racial parentage who aced his classes at Punahou, took Columbia University by storm, went on to be President of the Harvard Law Review, then wiped the floor with Billary Clinton. Give me that guy. I'm tired of losing. I think this guy knows how to win.