'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'Jonathan Raban
The Guardian, Saturday November 8 2008
On Tuesday, dodging the hubbub of election parties, I watched the results come in with two close friends and my teenage daughter. We might have been patients showing up at a hospital for a surgical procedure, nervously joking over the early returns from Vermont (predictably, Barack Obama) and Kentucky (predictably, John McCain). When, at 8:01pm, Pacific time, CNN called the race for Obama, we collapsed in one another's arms. Even my dry tear ducts did their job, and, for a few moments, the room swam out of focus. The champagne, whose presence in the fridge I had thought to be ominously bad karma, was opened. No toast. Just "Thank God, thank God, thank God", spoken by four devout atheists. There was little triumph in our emotion, only an overpowering wave of relief that, after eight years of manic derangement, America had at last come to its senses.
Inevitably, Wednesday's headlines were all about Obama's skin colour and the historic milestone of the first black presidency. For the United States and the rest of the world, that is a fact of huge symbolic importance, but it is the least of Obama's true credentials. What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times - someone who'll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment.
Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there. Much of the nightmare of the last eight years has arisen from the fact that one of the least intellectually curious or gifted presidents in history was in thrall to a group of passionate, but second-rate, neoconservative intellectuals, all associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose imperial agenda for the US was lost on the man they guided and advised. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, the architects of the war on Iraq and the "war on terror", were treated by George Bush as experts on parts of the world of which he was ignorant. "Wolfie" knew all about the Middle East; that this knowledge proceeded from a hardline political philosophy instilled in him by Richard Pipes of Harvard and Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago, both avid cold warriors and proponents of US military, political and cultural domination of the globe, was grasped, if at all, only very dimly by the 43rd president, who prided himself in reading no newspapers and being in bed by nine. While Bush was bicycling and cutting brush at his Crawford ranch in Texas, the intellectuals in his administration were staying up late in DC, busy about the task of reshaping the United States into the Roman Empire of the 21st century.
Since September 11 2001, the damage inflicted by intellectuals on America and its constitution and justice system, as well as on the outside world, has been so great that we ought to be wary of the election of an intellectual to the presidency, and, though he tried his best to veil his proclivities while on the stump, Obama is an intellectual. At the University of Chicago, he taught constitutional law, the most demanding and far-reaching area of study in US law schools. He names Philip Roth and EL Doctorow among his favourite living writers. In his memoir Dreams From My Father, the late-night life he describes himself as leading inside his own skull is every bit as real and vivid as the exterior life he records on the streets and in the homes of Honolulu, Jakarta, New York, Chicago and Kenya. Again and again in that book, one finds Obama in the small hours, reconstructing in his mind recent events, searching for patterns, making connections, a novelist teasing meaning and significance from the chaotic stream of daily contingencies. .......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/08/obama-race-democrats-us-elections
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