Legendary Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein is touring the country promoting his new biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman In Charge.  As a guest on Michael Medved's radio show on October 17, Mr. Bernstein lamented the dearth of "real biography," which his new book by most accounts certainly appears to be.  If there had been more "real biography" about the candidates during the 2000 Presidential campaign, Mr. Bernstein suggested, then the result of the election might have been different.  When interviewer Michael Medved asked Mr. Bernstein what he meant by that, Mr. Bernstein answered that a proper biography of candidate Bush would have revealed personality traits that even many congressional Republicans have confided to Mr. Bernstein are appalling.  When pressed about what such traits might be, Mr. Bernstein revealed the chief trait Republicans (not to mention Democrats) find problematic with the current chief executive is "intellectual laziness."  Apparently this is defined as not reading many books, though Mr. Bernstein did not attempt to refute reports that the President reads quite a lot.

Mr. Bernstein speaks with the infallibility of the mighty warrior who "brought down Nixon."  He resists being corrected on facts, insisting that he's right or, if shown to be wrong, that the distinction makes no difference—talk about intellectually lazy!—as in whether President Bush was told that the Katrina-threatened New Orleans levies were in danger of being "breached" or of being merely "topped."

Intellectual laziness would seem to be an unforgivable handicap for the President of the United States, but is it really?  Is intellectual laziness really what people are concerned about when they say it is?

When conservatives call liberals intellectually lazy, it means one thing, and when liberals use the term to describe conservatives, it means something else altogether.   Conservatives call liberals intellectually lazy because the latter cannot reach rational decisions; liberals do not sharpen their minds enough to cut through the gray areas that keep them from espousing coherent positions. The purpose of having an intellect is to observe the world and make decisions about it.  As Chesterton said:  "Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening a mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."

On the other hand, liberals reject Chesterton and attribute intellectual laziness to conservatives who do make decisions, who do hold opinions. Liberals today view the height of intellect as never making up one's mind.  Always keeping an open mind, always thinking that every decision ever made, every action ever taken, might have been a mistake, like the very founding of the United States, for example.  It's as though decisions are like cultures, none being better than any other.  The only place a person can function in a society with an intellect so superior that he cannot make a decision is at the lowest rung of the economic ladder or in a university or in a government bureaucracy.  

Beyond the basic education necessary to function in society, intellect for its own sake is no measure of presidential greatness.  An inverse relationship seems even more likely.

President Nixon was not intellectually lazy.  Nor was President Carter.  Nor was President Grant.  These Presidents are far more likely to be found on lists of the three worst than on lists of the ten best.  No one would accuse Abraham Lincoln of being intellectually lazy, for his determined self-education refutes the argument.  President Reagan was not necessarily intellectually lazy; he would better be described as intellectually efficient, yet he was denounced as being an "amiable dunce" by the never self-effacing Clark Clifford, or as downright stupid at every turn by less accomplished Democrats.  George W. Bush's alleged stupidity is all but axiomatic in the consciousness of much of the public.

Executives must make decisions.  If they are so overwhelmed by their own intelligence that they cannot make decisions, they are worthless as executives.  This gets at the root of the difference between knowledge and information.  Just being able to suffer a lot of information manifested as intellectual noise might be a mark of intelligence, but cutting through the noise requires more than intelligence; it requires knowledge.  The most learned and intellectual college professor still has to call a plumber with a GED to fix his leaky faucet because the professor either lacks the knowledge of what to do or is too intellectually lazy to try to gain the knowledge for himself.  It's not that the professor's "decision" to hire a plumber is strictly economic either, for the plumber probably earns more than the professor.

Perhaps being liberal means never having to make one's own decisions.  That a decision was made to call the plumber in the above example does not invalidate the argument, because the decision was probably made by the professor's more conservative spouse.