A few of the people who rose to the Presidency have had extraordinary mental capabilities, often mixed with ability to focus like a laser.
Teddy Roosevelt was a natural speed reader with a photographic memory who from childhood devoured books and records and statistics - and he remembered every speck of what he read. He'd creep people out by reciting verbatim to them passages of books they'd written decades earlier and he would debate minute points - sometimes in one of the 7 languages he spoke and read. He was a freak, but he was an honest and self disciplined man.
JFK was also a speed reader with incredible absorption and memory abilities, and he was a deep thinker. Jimmy Carter is in the same category of smarts, combined with an intense self discipline, hard work ethic and strong moral foundation. He's to be admired for all he has done, all of his life. Jimmy didn't vanish to loaf around his ranch after he left the White House; he's stayed active and committed to making this a better world. Bill Clinton also has that type of giant flexible intellect - hungry for information and with a scarey ability to absorb and retain and recall details, and to assimilate bits and pieces from all over the place that specialist can't do. Obama is likewise an intellectual monster, and he has extreme awareness and self discipline and self control. He absorbs and observes and catalogs everything, knows where he is and what the game is about all the time. People who work with him say he misses very little and does not forget anything, is excellent at using time, and he asks the right questions. Like Clinton and Jimmy, Obama sucks in data like its air, but he doesn't get lost in weeds or distracted. He retains all and is exceptional at using massive amounts of information he has stored covering a wide array of topics and does so in ways very very few humans can. We're lucky to have Barack Obama as our President. He, they, truly are different - they aren't "like us".
Romney, GW Bush, Rick Perry, Paul Ryan, Ronald Reagan....they couldn't make a move without somebody instructing them which foot to put forward first.
Jimmy Carter is a great person, but he made mistakes as President - one of them was he underestimated how low would the Reagan-Bush neocons go to gain power.