Campaigning Against Intelligence

In the Vice Presidential debate, as in much of the rhetoric spouted at the Republican convention, the implication has been repeatedly advanced that Barack Obama is just too hotsy totsy smart to relate to regular Americans. Over and over, this campaign season, in relationship to Obama, intelligence has been equated with elitism.

And why not? The strategy had already been spectacularly successful for George Bush.

But VP candidate Sarah Palin has upped the ante on the message considerably with her aggressively anti-intellectual, just-plain folksy pronouncements about Joe Six-Pack, and how annoying it was to have some TV reporter asking her questions about, of all things, (OMG!) reading.

(Of course, in addition to her anti-smarty-pants stance, Palin has also been busy hate mongering in a manner that grows more disturbingly reckless with each passing campaign day. Hey, WWJD, girlfriend? Not this, that’s for damned sure. But we’ll talk about that another time.)

In truth, a well-grounded, nimble, humane intelligence is one of the qualities that we’re going to need most from a commander-in-chief if we are to successfully find our way through the very daunting challenges that loom ahead of us as a nation.

Many of us who supported Obama early on were attracted to his candidacy because of the power of his intellect even more than the power of his oratory, which didn’t come through all that well in the first primary debates.

However, explaining to others why we found his intelligence so nuanced and unsually compelling, often wasn’t that easy.

Interestingly, the best take on the matter I’ve read of late, comes from, not a liberal, but a conservative.

Longtime conservative columnist,, David Brooks, is a John McCain supporter. But he also admires Obama.

However, Brooks doesn’t have much good to say about McCain’s running mate. In fact, here’s some of what he said in a recent interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about Palin’s anti-intellectualism:

Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices.

Then later in the interview, Brooks went on to say this about Obama’s intelligence and his skills in social perception.

Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, ‘Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?’ And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So i say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he’s a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, ‘David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you’re only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.’ And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

Right.

So, when did being smart become a bad thing?