I don’t think that Obama wasn’t intelligent.
I think he was very intelligent.
My points are that Obama was callow and unengaged intellectually and his primary interest was in pursuing power. As a campaigner and in understanding what his audience wanted he was a genius.
Libs misunderstood Obama because he flattered them in extreme and unprecedented ways. This led to libs developing a weird parasocial relationship with Obama that out of narcissism and seeing themselves reflected back in him warped their perceptions: ‘Obama is deep and intellectually serious! Just like us! Look at his book lists! He reads what we read!’
But that’s not the case, Obama never expressed interesting ideas, and it was clear he was in over his head during his presidency (eg. he couldn’t make sense of the wars he inherited, deferred too much to nat sec, elevated morons like Ben Rhodes, etc) and after he got out of office, when he was free to do what he wanted he busied himself partying with celebrities, patting himself on the back, and designing his imperial mausoleum. Has he pursued any serious intellectual endeavors with all his free time? Netflix documentaries?
Obama should be a case study in how progressives’ self regard led them to misunderstand politics, but I guess they’re still too brittle for that sort of accounting even though Obama has been out of office for a nearly a decade almost all of which has been a disaster for them.
People forget that Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude at Harvard Law. You can't affirmative action your way into an academic distinction like that.