I'd say "yes, but..."

Kaus poses a question that might get him in hot water with the MSM and Journolisters:

Is Obama intellectually incurious?

Both Bush and Obama seem to be incurious but in very different ways.

I think that GWB shared this trait with Sir Robert Peel:

Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

Obama strikes me as one of those people who divide knowledge into two categories: those things he knows, and those things that are unimportant. After all, he is the candidate who reportedly told a key staffer:

"I think I'm a better speech writer than my speech writers. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm a better political director than my political director."

On the specific issue of the economy, i think we are seeing the result of a curious mixture of cold cynicism and naive faith. I discussed the cynical part here. The naive faith was the belief that the economic problems of January 2009 would take care of themselves (with maybe a little help from Keynes). He, and his team,thought the economic crisis provided more opportunity than danger.