At his press conference Friday, the President-Elect said he was rereading Lincoln for "inspiration," but he may also want to take another look at David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest."
Like JFK, Barack Obama values brains, but Halberstam's book might inspire him to be wary of the hubris that can blindside academic brilliance without accompanying insight into the realities of human behavior, as it did with Kennedy's overachievers who went on to bring down LBJ with their tunnel vision of the Vietnam war.
Obama has shown the self-awareness and empathy--some call it "emotional intelligence"--needed for leadership but, in overturning all the clichés about "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," the real test will come in creating and managing a government with all those qualities.
"The second most remarkable thing about his election," Nicholas Kristof writes, "is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual...
"Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse—a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance—doesn’t get very far either."
But, Kristof adds, "It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas."
The 1972 look back at Vietnam took its scathing "Best and Brightest" title from Kennedy's so-called "whiz kids," thinkers from industry and academia such as Robert McNamara and the Bundy brothers, whom Halberstam characterized as arrogantly insisting on "brilliant policies that defied common sense" in the Vietnam quagmire.
(For his pains, a new report shows Halberstam was closely tracked by the FBI for two decades, another sign that too much thinking of any kind is suspect in American politics.)
Obama's Illinois predecessor, Adlai Stevenson, who lost the presidency twice half a century ago being labeled an unworldly "egghead," observed, “The hardest thing about any campaign is how to win without proving you’re unworthy of winning.”
The President-Elect has cleared that hurdle and now faces the higher leap into governing with a winning balance of heart and mind.
Showing posts with label anti-intellectualism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-intellectualism. Show all posts
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Sunday, September 07, 2008
The Smart/Shrewd Divide
After eight years of obstinate stupidity in the White House, the change voters should want most is a combination of common sense and common decency.
"You can't beat brains," JFK used to say, but this year's debate has somehow been shifted to a mistrust of intelligence--at first by Hillary Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama as naïve, followed by John McCain's claims of wisdom only through suffering and now by Sarah Palin's salty assertion of hockey-mom shrewdness.
What will be at stake in the next two months is how Americans judge the qualities of mind they want in a president. The threat of terrorism, the woes of the economy, the endangered environment require more than a sound-bite mentality and a determination to, in the most frequently used word in McCain's acceptance speech, "fight" and respond to mindless chants of "drill, baby, drill."
In the campaign, Barack Obama's open-mindedness is being distorted into irresolution, but what he would bring, as conservative David Brooks noted almost two years ago, is "a deliberative style to the White House [that] will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.”
So far, John McCain's campaign has been fueled by the same Karl Rovian "cleverness," the familiar cast of lobbyists, the cronyness of opportunists like Joe Lieberman and now the selection of a VP who puts a fresh face on the same stale ideas of the Religious Right and the Neo-Cons.
Obama himself and those who support him know he doesn't have all the answers, but he will be asking the right questions and bringing to bear what the best minds have to offer in searching for solutions.
If voters are going to risk the future on real change, they would do well to take their chances with brains in the White House rather revert to what Richard Hofstadter labeled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" almost half a century ago.
"You can't beat brains," JFK used to say, but this year's debate has somehow been shifted to a mistrust of intelligence--at first by Hillary Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama as naïve, followed by John McCain's claims of wisdom only through suffering and now by Sarah Palin's salty assertion of hockey-mom shrewdness.
What will be at stake in the next two months is how Americans judge the qualities of mind they want in a president. The threat of terrorism, the woes of the economy, the endangered environment require more than a sound-bite mentality and a determination to, in the most frequently used word in McCain's acceptance speech, "fight" and respond to mindless chants of "drill, baby, drill."
In the campaign, Barack Obama's open-mindedness is being distorted into irresolution, but what he would bring, as conservative David Brooks noted almost two years ago, is "a deliberative style to the White House [that] will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.”
So far, John McCain's campaign has been fueled by the same Karl Rovian "cleverness," the familiar cast of lobbyists, the cronyness of opportunists like Joe Lieberman and now the selection of a VP who puts a fresh face on the same stale ideas of the Religious Right and the Neo-Cons.
Obama himself and those who support him know he doesn't have all the answers, but he will be asking the right questions and bringing to bear what the best minds have to offer in searching for solutions.
If voters are going to risk the future on real change, they would do well to take their chances with brains in the White House rather revert to what Richard Hofstadter labeled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" almost half a century ago.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)