The smartest woman in the world?

Over on American Thinker Thomas Lifson looks at the commonly held belief that Hillary Clinton is a highly intelligent woman:

Based on some of the bone-headed political moves she has made, as well as on the lengths she has gone to cover her academic tracks, I have long suspected that she is much better at getting into elite schools than at actually excelling as a student. IBD [Investor's Business Daily] puts together several pieces of the puzzle indicating these suspicions may be well-grounded.

IBD starts with a fascinating nugget of information drawn from one or other of the new books:

"...if she's so smart, how did she flunk the D.C. bar exam, one of the easiest in the nation?"

That's a great question. The first answer is that Yale Law School, the ultra-elite institution she attended (because of its small size and big name, Yale is reportedly the hardest law school in the country at which to be accepted), doesn't really place much emphasis on teaching the actual hum-drum business of lawyering. Instead, Yale asks its students to grapple with large question, especially those on the "cutting edge" of legal theory (translation: leftist ideology).

The theory at Yale Law, as I understand it, is that their students are so darn smart they can pick up the mundane stuff in a snap, at bar review courses and as junior lawyers. My guess is that Hillary, after having been told how smart she is and after hearing that the DC bar exam is a snap, figured she had it made in the shade. Arrogance, in other words.

[. . .]

Everything I have learned by reading and by talking with people who knew Hillary during her student days and early career suggests that her greatest skill was in cultivating powerful patrons who could help her along. Although her charms completely elude me, I am told that her full schmooze mode is highly engaging in a face-to-face encounter, and long ago mastered the art of creating the impression that she is something special and that your encounter with her is somehow meaningful.

[. . .]

Hillary, in other words, is a consummate networker and climber.

But climbers need something higher up to scale. At the top, there is nowhere to climb. What would Hillary do as president, without an obvious higher office toward which to strive? The possible answers are frightening. One would be to aim at being the Secretary-General of the UN, on the theory that it is the closest job to head-of-the-world that currently exists. An alternative would be to seek to be the most popular government head among the G-8 leaders of major countries, going for the approval of other governments at the expense of American national interests.

But the worst possible substitute is that Hillary would aim at making history: doing things unprecedented in their ambition (remember health care?) and promising a large impact on future generations (the legacy factor). I prefer that our presidents seek to protect and defend the Constitution, as their oath of office requires. But then, of course, Hillary has never been about following the rules applying to others. Ambition plus certain social skills plus ruthlessness plus lack of discernment equals danger.

Not a bad summary of Mrs. Bill Clinton's professional life. A mediocre intellect chained to bottomless ambition and untempered by any sort of morality outside of the kind of leftist boilerplate found at an early 70's era SDS meeting.