Interesting article on Obama from University of Chicago magazine

[undeterred]

I am an alum, and I learned lots of interesting things I didn't know:

Elemental Obama
While political pundits debate whether a former Law School lecturer is too University of Chicago to be president of the United States, the U of C focuses on—what else?—what it means to be U of C.

By Lydialyle Gibson

This past spring, New York Times columnist David Brooks, AB’83, recited one of his favorite stories about Barack Obama for a packed audience of Alumni Weekend–goers. Late one evening in April 2007, in the midst of a phone interview with the candidate—who, tired and cranky, was still on the Senate floor—Brooks found himself getting nowhere with questions about foreign-aid programs in Africa. So “out of the blue,” he decided to ask about Reinhold Niebuhr, a 20th-century American theologian and activist who was both a preacher and a professor and whose moral insights, after witnessing two world wars, the Great Depression, Nazi death camps, and Soviet gulags, led him from the social-gospel liberalism of his youth to the sadder, wiser ambivalence of Christian realism. Had Obama read Niebuhr? Yes, in fact, Niebuhr was a philosopher he particularly cherished. Well, what did Niebuhr mean to him? “And then for the next ten or 15 minutes,” Brooks told his Chicago audience, “Obama did a complete version of Niebuhr’s thought, unbroken.”

Brooks, who likes to joke that being a conservative columnist at the New York Times is like being chief rabbi at Mecca, was impressed enough to recount the exchange in the next day’s paper. He called Obama’s campaign “an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle”—a delicate task indeed: animated by a belief in human sinfulness and fallibility, Niebuhr’s view of history was built on ironies and paradoxes. As Germany’s Weimar Republic crumbled beneath Hitler’s vigorous ascent in 1932, Niebuhr wrote in Moral Man and Immoral Society, “The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.” But he was no cynic; he recognized power’s necessity as well as its corruptibility, and he believed that the world’s realities, however grim or obstinate, were no excuse for abandoning the struggle. In 1944, a year that saw the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, the courageous, calamitous Warsaw Uprising and the Nazi surrender of Paris, Niebuhr concluded, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

Obama’s grasp of Niebuhrian complexities, and his ability to articulate them off the cuff at the end of a long day, “is a skill,” Brooks told his U of C audience, “that’s rare in American politics.” Glancing around the Donnelley Center classroom where listeners filled every seat and stood pressed against the back wall, Brooks noted, “This is bound to impress those of us affiliated with this institution.”

But what about the rest of the country? Three days after Brooks’s visit to campus, during the waning minutes of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews mused on Obama’s apparent difficulty connecting with working-class, Middle America voters. Hillary Clinton had dropped out of the Democratic race the week before, but her supporters were not all flocking to Obama. Why? Matthews asked his roundtable of journalists: “Is he too University of Chicago?”

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0810/features/obama.shtml