Inevitably, Wednesday’s headlines were all about Obama’s skin color 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. Since Sept. 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. His memoir Dreams From My Father reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they’re dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader. The self at the center of the book is, above all, an intent watcher and listener — one of those on whom, as Henry James said of the ideal writer, nothing is lost — and there runs through the story an almost worshipful regard for what Obama calls “the messy, contradictory details of our experience”. The unique contradictions and messinesses of his own childhood made him an empiricist by instinct, finding a path for himself by testing his footing each step of the way. His education at Columbia and Harvard made him an empiricist by training. In the Illinois state Senate as well as in the US Senate, this has been his habit as a legislator, to solicit counterarguments against his own position, to deploy his unusual talent as a close and sympathetic listener, to probe, to doubt, to adapt, to change.
During the last two years he has been quietly surrounding himself with other intellectuals. Two are law professors: Cass Sunstein of Chicago and Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who taught Obama there and called him “the most impressive student I’d ever worked with”. There’s Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s senior economic adviser, from the business school at Chicago, a highly eclectic behavioral economist, who writes about the dismal science with both impressive clarity and skeptical humor.
This growing coterie of wits and scholars looks a lot like the “brain trust” which Franklin Roosevelt assembled in 1932 to shape the New Deal. Happy in the company of prominent intellectuals, and with a mind equal to theirs, Obama promises to spectacularly raise the IQ and the standard of debate inside the White House (unlike John Kennedy, who liked intellectuals as ornaments of his administration, but never seriously engaged their talents).
Early in the campaign, he was painted as an empty optimist — a description that couldn’t be more wrong. For every rousing “Yes, we can!”, there was the caveat of “It won’t be easy”, and, uniquely among the raft of candidates in the primaries, Obama brought to the election a clear-sighted grasp of the tragic aspect of US history. His most uplifting speeches were grounded in images of the shame of slavery, the national agony of the civil war and the intimate humiliations of poverty in America, and it was by reminding his audiences of the depths to which the country is prone to sink that he was able to summon them to hope.On Tuesday, there was a strong echo of Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech when Obama said, “I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.” After eight years of an administration whose hallmarks have been secrecy, dishonesty, and a refusal to listen to any voice outside its own inner circle, this promise of candor and conversation was probably the most important policy statement that he could make as president-elect.
We’ve elected as president someone who is empirical, cautious, conservative with a small “c”, yet unusually sure of his own judgment when he makes it, which is often slowly. He’s sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It’s a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation’s welfare (and not just this nation’s), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night.
