ABSTRACT
George W. Bush is a president with guilelessly inexact syntax, or as Maureen Dowd put it, a president "not known for his linguistic precision". In asking whether Mr. Bush is smart enough to be a good president, it is important to be clear at the outset exactly to what the words refer. The chapter addresses various key questions: What does being smart mean? How being "smart" is related to be a "good president" and Is Mr. Bush smart enough to be a good president? Smart is a word that stimulates intuitive understanding. Many think they know what it means. However, a glance at any thesaurus ought to make clear— quickly—that there is much more complexity to this term than we ordinarily allow. Both ambition and developmental drift are primarily matters of psychology, not intelligence. Smart underachievers are fairly common, and there is no good evidence that Bush lacked the capacity to achieve when he set his mind to doing so.
