Would a Geek Make a Good President?

[amykhar]

I read list list today: 11 Signs Your Presidential Candidate isn’t a Geek | [Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News

and got to wondering. While many women think geeks make good husbands, would a geek make a good president?

The seated mayor of Reading is a geek, and in my book he's Super Duper. But, I'm not certain how well it would scale to a national level.

[erik_kosberg]

We've already had a geek President. Hoover was an engineer. Look how well that worked out.

[Stokes Pennwalt]

On the geek scale, Navy nuclear propulsion engineers rank somewhere between Trekkies and the guy who discovered Cat Schwatz's boobs in Photoshop.

[erik_kosberg]

In addition to being a farmer, Carter was a Rickover protégé in the early days of the nuclear submarine program.

That's two geeks we've had.

[amykhar]

Carter may have been a lame president, but I still am pretty fond of the old guy.

I think geeks may tend to be too abstract in some cases to be efficient leaders. And, they don't tend to be in tune socially, which is necessary when you are trying to deal with petty people or politicians.

[drmomentum[$]]

I think a geek could do fine. There are stealth geeks.

I think that, nowadays, you need a vacuous celebrity quality that not many geeks have.

[brian_igo]

Not too many geeks I've known are good at playing the kind of people games you need to be successful in politics. I think if you read about his personal dealings with Congress and the Beltway crowd you could definitely say that geeky quality was one of Carter's key failings. He never quite got that being able to persuade was at least as important as being as smart as anyone on the substance of the issue.