Obama's intelligence

I read some of this interview from April 2, 2009 and part of it intrigued me enough so that I still remember it, especially this exchange:

Robinson: You are quoted in the Boston Globe, "I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual." How good is Obama's mind?
Epstein: His mind is pretty good, but it is a clever "means-ends" mind. He has never written a scholarly article in his entire life. 

 I still do not know exactly what that a clever "means-ends" mind is.

Epstein's assessment here is rather frightening, but may explain a lot of what we have seen in the past 18 months:

But, the difficulty you get, for someone who has only worked in that situation, is that he believes the creation of private wealth is something the government cannot influence or destroy. He has many fancy redistribution schemes, in addition to his health plan and new labor laws, which are all wealth killers.