I understand that, but its a defense against what is an irrelevant attack.

A President should not be judged on their character or intelligence. They should be judged on their Presidency. I'll put it in terms I can understand, and you might too. Metaphors are fun.

So let's say you go see a movie with some friends, specifically the new Transformers movie - Transformers 4: Rise of the Cobra Surfer - and it is predictably dogshit.

Your one friend happens to be really annoyed by this movie. So he rants off about it, saying how the acting was terrible, the cinematography was confusing, the narrative was awful, the dialogue was unbelievable and cheesy, and the CGI looked like shit. His criticisms do not sit well with your other friend. Let's call them Larry.

Larry really liked it. So he tries to defend it. He tries to defend the acting but of course he's wrong and is crushed. Same with the cinematography, the narrative, and the dialogue. So he goes for the last criticism: "No, the CGI was really great! They really managed to animate these gigantic dumb ass robots and it looked totally believable when they punched each other."

Turns out Larry is right! The CGI was actually really well done and received praise.

Guess what? You all still saw a shitty movie because it had an ass for a narrative, dialogue made out of wood and a lack of chemistry, shots that made no sense and obscured the action, and acting that could have been better accomplished by putting toddlers in front of the camera and letting them drool for three hours.

You can have CGI as great as it gets, you can have a President as smart as they come, but if the film or the time spent in office is still abysmal for basically everything in the country, then its a failure. Intelligence and CGI are both tools; they are a means to an end, but not the end in and of themselves. The end for a film is usually a really good narrative, and the end for a Presidency is supposed to be improving the country. If that wasn't accomplished, then who cares if the tool was good? It still didn't work.