Conventional wisdom says that Barack Obama is intelligent and Sarah Palin is not. I’m getting a little annoyed at the press who freely proclaim who the smart ones are. There is more to intelligence than an Ivy League education. I would have agreed that Bill Clinton was smart, until he got nasty with a blue dress in the White House.

Clinton may have been a Rhodes Scholar, but that act proved he was not very intelligent. For those who think it was just a mistake, ask yourself a question, how many other mistakes did he make that we did not know about? By the way, this was a conscious decision Clinton made, not a mistake. Wise decision making is the best evidence for intelligence.

Many people have commented on how great it is to have such a smart president in office. I don’t know what Obama’s IQ is and I don’t know that it matters. I do know that the manager of a local Taco Bell knows more about the struggles of teenagers than he does. The guy that risked everything to start a business, to attract satisfied customers, and to hire the right people to grow the company knows more about economics than Timothy Geithner.

Obama decided to send extra troops to Afghanistan. This was months after the request had been submitted by the military. Why did it take so much time to decide? The press said it was because Obama is so smart and needed the time to ponder. Military history does not speak well of the leaders who took a lot of time to ponder during wartime.

At the same time, Obama is frustrated that a healthcare bill is taking so long. There has never been a bigger and more costly piece of legislation in our history, yet this needs to be done quickly? I would suggest that now is the time for in-depth pondering.

One of the most intelligent people I have ever met was my dad. He was a WWII survivor of D-Day and a lifelong farmer with no college education. I grew up watching him milk cows, bale hay, fix equipment, plow fields, and shovel…well…fertilizer. I guarantee he knew more about agriculture than Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. Vilsack was raised in an orphanage, adopted by an insurance salesman, and spent his adult life as a lawyer and politician. Of course, after being governor of Iowa, he was the smartest farmer for the job.

Politics is a funny world. If you are good at Whack-a-Mole you could be a politician. Political decision making is whacking whatever issue pops up and keep the moles/issues down until the next election. I don’t expect a lot of wisdom to be on display in the halls of congress. So who is the smartest? We may find the smartest person at the arcade instead of Harvard.

Intelligence is much more than scoring high on an IQ test or being able to talk about the classics at a Manhattan party. The ultimate test is one’s proven ability to make wise decisions in challenging times. Sadly, most of our politicians define wisdom in terms of a vote instead of hard experiences. We need to be asking some different questions of the candidates in 2010.