The Uber-Liberal Daily Kos website has published Texas governor Rick Perry’s college transcripts. You can view them here. Perry was no scholar at Texas A&M University. He was a C student. Liberals see this as a disqualification for a presidential candidate. At least we have the governor’s transcripts. The same can’t be said for the sitting president whose college and law school transcripts have not been made public.

A person’s grades are not always determinative of what he or she does in life. There are lots of C students who have gone on to do great things and lots of A students who have been miserable failures. Liberals are notorious for pushing how smart a candidate is. Barack Obama is said to be one of our smartest presidents. If he is so smart, then why is he spending money we don’t have? Why can’t he fix the economy? It’s very easy to do. It wouldn’t take me more than 15 minutes to lay out a strategy, and I didn’t go to Harvard Law School.

The best educational job I ever had was working in a hardware store. I learned how to cut glass, thread pipe, make concrete slabs, drive a dump truck, run a Bobcat, mix paint, and a thousand and one other things. One day a frustrated woman came into the store holding some mangled plumbing fixtures. Her scholar husband couldn’t hammer a nail, fix a plumbing leak, or do typical handyman repairs. I know a lot of really smart people who know little about economics, and what they think they know are the very things that are destroying our economy.

This debate over college grades and governmental competency reminded me of David Halberstam’s 1972 book The Best and the Brightest. “The focus of the book is on the foreign policy crafted by the academics and intellectuals who were in John F. Kennedy’s administration, and the consequences of those policies in Vietnam.” The phrase “the best and the brightest” referred to President Kennedy’s “‘whiz kids’ — leaders of industry and academia brought into the Kennedy administration — whom Halberstam characterized as arrogantly insisting on ‘brilliant policies that defied common sense’ . . .” These so-called intellectuals got us into Vietnam, got more than 58,000 Americans and 1.5 million Vietnamese killed, and couldn’t get us. The iconic scene of people desperately trying to escape by helicopter is a fitting image of what the “best and the brightest” got us into.

Perry got a D in economics. Good for him. It was most likely Keynesian Economics, one of the most boring and convoluted courses ever devised by academia.

Given what academics from Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy Leaguers have done to our nation, I think a C student should have a shot at the presidency. All he has to do is follow directions. It’s all written out in the Constitution. There are some other basics. Stop sending our best and brightest young people to fight wars that never end. Stop spending money you don’t have. Don’t steal from some people so you can give it to other people so they will vote for you. Don’t try to create money out of nothing. It’s immoral and it doesn’t work. Who’s more right about Social Security, the media “intellectuals” or Gov. Perry who knows that it’s a Ponzi scheme and isn’t afraid to say so?

I am not endorsing Mr. Perry. Having said this, I will not sit back and let the Left set the agenda for what constitutes a good candidate. If you don’t like Perry, then deal with policy issues and not his grades from more than 20 years ago.