Can An Intellectual Be President?
by Devilstower
Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:53:15 AM PDT
Not can a "smart person" be president, but an intellectual. There's a difference. Bill Clinton attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, but no one would have pegged the McDonald's-munching Clinton as an ivory-tower egghead. George W. Bush attended both Harvard and Yale, but I think we're safe in saying that the word "intellectual" could not be attached to him with all the barbed wire in Texas. Flipping backwards through the list of presidential candidates, the last guy who had the sign "intellectual" hanging from his neck was probably Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy probably deserved it, but I'm assured that the "dreamy" factor offset any tendency toward sustained Latin discourse.
But after several rounds of selecting presidents by the beer test, can we instead vote for a candidate who doesn't hide her/his smarts? Megan Daum has a discussion of the downtrodden intellectual in her LA Times column.
With political discourse reduced to screaming contests and actual news eclipsed by exclusive and shocking footage of celebrities without makeup, we've become not only impatient with but downright opposed to the kinds of ideas that can't be reduced to a line on a screen crawl or a two-sentence blog entry.
What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's because they've fallen into the trap of believing that complicated ideas ("complicated" now constituting anything that requires reading, watching or listening to in its entirety) are the purview of the "elite."
Most of the vitriol being levied at Obama these days boils down to his shocking refusal to mouth the standard phrases all politicians are supposed to say, the ones that seem to make up 110% of John McCain's vocabulary. Listening to Obama requires that you engage more than political cruise control and actually think about what he's saying. Can we put up with that?
But even if Obama is not an intellectual in the classic sense, there's no doubt that he's absorbed the trappings of erudite rhetoric. He offers up ideas that don't lend themselves to sound bites but require some sustained attention. And according to the media and the political spin machine, that's proof he's snobby and out of touch.
One of the things that strikes people who've spent any time in Europe is that Europeans tend to be almost universally bookish. By that I don't mean they travel around with a copy of Proust tucked under one arm, but if they've read past the cover page of Remembrance of Things Past they're not afraid to toss their own two euros into the discussion. That doesn't mean for a moment that Europeans are one neuron smarter than Americans, only that they don't seem convinced that knowledge is something you should feel bad about.
America suffers from a national schizophrenia on education. Everybody thinks it's a good idea to get an education, but displaying that education is looked on as a sin. Knowing how to do a better job for the country and explaining it with clear and thorough reasoning, rather than offering up ignorance spiced with tired stock phrases and pithy platitudes, may ultimately turn out to be disqualifying.
Fortunately this isn't true at Daily Kos. Intellectuals aren't afraid to show their light here. For example, within five minutes, someone will be along to explain how I misused schizophrenia.
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