Does academic achievement bring Oval Office success?

[Geee]

Daily Caller:

How smart do we want our presidents to be, and what does their academic performance tell us about their chances for success?

This month Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s college transcript was leaked, and the Republican presidential contender’s academic performance at Texas A&M turned out to be less than stellar. Perry’s critics seized on the document to suggest that he didn’t have the aptitude to serve as leader of the free world.

Is there a correlation between success in the White House and a president’s perceived intelligence, or at least between academic performance and Oval Office success?

American University historian Allan Lichtman told The Daily Caller that he believes so.

“If you look at some of the least successful presidents,” he said, “they’re not exactly known for their [intellectual] prowess … Whereas the most brilliant of the presidents are all either very successful or at least reasonably successful.”

How, then, does one explain Jimmy Carter, thought to be smart but generally considered a not-so-great president? What of Ronald Reagan, media-cast as an “amiable dunce” but considered by many to be a historically great chief executive?

“Reagan was smarter than people give him credit for,” Licthman said. “It is a very rough correlation, and there will be exceptions, but overall it is a reasonable correlation.”

Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith, who is a scholar-in-residence in history and public policy at George Mason University, disagrees.

“I don’t think there is a direct correlation between success in the classroom as tested by a grade book and success in the Oval Office,” he told TheDC.

Smith explained that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is regularly ranked among America’s greatest presidents by historians, had an “undistinguished” academic career but had a type of intelligence that was more important than book smarts.