I have NOT read the book.  However, my brother is autistic, and my grandfather has Asperger's.  I've also volunteered in the special ed department of my local public school.  TJ, autistic to ANY extent?  Bosh, bosh, bosh.  His entire political life is inconsistent with such a disability.  He would have been flatly incapable of participating in a meaningful debate with give-and-take on ANY subject, he would have avoided the public eye, and he would have been dreadful at giving speeches.  Even his personal life is inconsistent with anyone on the autistic spectrum.
Some of the features of autism and Asperger's include:
-need for total predictability--change of any sort is bad, if not disastrous--this would make the vagaries of a political career unbearable
-inability or difficulty in comprehending the existence other people's points of points of view--heavily "pre-occupational"--this would make coherent debate or argumentation very difficult, and it would make the person appear highly selfish
-difficulty carrying on a conversation--habit of talking at and not with people--leads to a reputation for oddity or boorishness
-great difficulty in understanding one's own emotions, greater difficulty in expressing them--strong attachments can be formed, but mutual attachments of any sort are rare--appreciation of the opposite sex in the more profound cases never passes beyond the theoretical--a promiscuous autistic at any level is almost a contradiction in terms
-great difficulty in deciphering emotions from tone of voice, expression, etc.--tendency to be a literalist--avoidance and dislike of figures of speech--this also make casual conversation difficult, as the autistic must carefully sift through and reinterpret all signals for memorized matches for facial expression, sarcasm, exaggeration, etc., and he often makes mistakes
-difficulty in making eye contact
-avoidance of using people's names and using descriptions and relationships instead to specify them
-avoidance in using questions--makes statements of desire to avoid a direct refusal
-avoidance of social interaction
-inability to deal with people outside of an expected context--e.g., meeting a teacher in the grocery store or a business associate at the gas station
-aversion to interacting with strangers
-bullet-like speech--words are spoken with force even in a casual setting
-love of absolutes, extremes, and logic--black and white dichotomies--extreme difficulty in compromising
Anyhow, this is only the beginning, but suffice it to say that no autistic could ever come across as a man of the people or even vaguely charismatic, and he'd be a disaster in politics and diplomacy except under exceptional and very sheltered conditions.  Louis XVI is a much, much better candidate for autism, more profound than just Asperger's, too, and his disastrous career would be typical of an autistic in a similar position.

--Rey



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