The Intellectual as President

I belong to a small group. Overeducated and often underemployed, we read small magazines and argue politics, and we try to elevate those conversations with forays into literature, history, and philosophy. We are the dreaded I-word — “intellectuals.” Rarely do we matter in public life. But back in 2008, it’s safe to say that Barack Obama seemed like one of us.

His biography screamed “intellectual.” Consider his liberal-arts education at Occidental College, then at Columbia University. He could parse Democracy in America, cite morally-complex fare like T.S. Eliot’s poetry, and chat about All the King’s Men. When he embarked on community organizing, he framed activism in big questions of democracy. Before becoming a politician, Obama was a writer — not just Dreams From My Father, but numerous journalistic pieces. Most of us recognized his wit but also a finely tuned mind that could see both sides of a given issue. Some credited his law-school training — from Harvard, no less — but I think it was his willingness to be playful about ideas.

Remembering Obama in 2008 drove me to reread Norman Mailer’s classic 1960 essay about JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Hopped up on his own brand of existentialism (and perhaps pot), Mailer saw in Kennedy a political hero who could combat the mass culture of the “supermarket, that homogeneous extension of stainless surfaces,” and the doddering Eisenhower. Mailer cited Kennedy’s “cool grace” and political intelligence and was delighted that the future president had read his books (or at least named some). Mailer believed a hipster — his own exalted ideal — was about to enter the White House.

Mailer’s essay suffered its faults, but it still resonated when I thought back to the Obama of 2008. For I remember something my millennial students do not: just how “hot” politics became under George W. Bush. Consider the blunder in Iraq. The choice of war always felt predetermined, rushed, heated. And the man leading the initiative appeared uncurious. His malapropisms symbolized a scrambled brain. He admitted not reading books and called himself “the decider.” His was the quintessential anti-intellectual presidency, and Obama’s politics of cool intelligence could, perhaps, defuse it.

Any presidency — but especially one whose campaign boasted slogans like “Yes, We Can” — will be a letdown. Mailer felt the same of JFK — the disastrous Bay of Pigs and the caving to militaristic advisers, the failure to act on civil rights, the championing of corporate tax cuts. For many on the left, the promise of Candidate Obama gave way to the compromise of President Obama. Consider the jeremiads of Thomas Frank, Chris Hedges, and the perpetually cranky Cornel West. Choose your disappointment: the weaknesses of Obamacare, the inability to shut down Guantánamo, the inaction on mounting poverty, the deference toward Wall Street.

Then there was his approach toward higher education. Throughout his presidency, Obama has viewed a college education simply in vocational terms. You see that in his College Scorecard (which assumes that level of pay after graduation is a sufficient measure of an education’s worth). And there was his nasty dig at “art history” majors, when he laid out a job-training proposal in Wisconsin two years ago. Some of us wanted to scream: What about the inherent worth of knowledge — the internal virtues of learning — that the president should be defending? Remember Occidental?

So does it matter that an intellectual has occupied the White House for the past eight years? Asking this question brings us to our Mailer problem. Mailer hoped for heroism in politics, believing that the choice of Kennedy would transform “the imagination of the American.” After Vietnam, Watergate, and Iraq, few of us look to politics for heroism or grandiose transformation; in fact, we rightfully distrust such romanticism. Obama’s own reading of Reinhold Niebuhr provided him with a sense of realism, an understanding that we all work within limits (including, for him, a recalcitrant opposition party). Having a gift for the playfulness of ideas can’t change that reality. And yet, on occasion these last few years, you could enjoy the glimmers of a president thinking, like when Obama discussed his summer reading materials, gave deliberative answers to journalists at press conferences, or cracked witty jokes at press-corps dinners (the historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “Wit is humor intellectualized”).

Admittedly, those examples seem small. And they lacked the strong contrast that Obama first presented in 2008, when his leadership style played well against the Bush era that my millennial students have forgotten about.

Which is why maybe now we really can see the importance of Obama’s intellectual, hip, and cool leadership. The contrast of 2016 is, of course, with Donald Trump. As the song goes, You don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Trump is clearly the anti-Obama candidate, in all sorts of ways but especially in terms of style. Trump is George W. Bush on steroids, bellicose and impulsive, with very little deliberative feel to his pronouncements (more and more of which he has to walk back clumsily). He reminds me of the hotness of the Bush years, with all its bluster and fury. In contrast, Obama looks like both a man about to leave the White House and someone capable of holding onto the principles of complexity and the capacity to understand ideas. Obama didn’t transform America by being a man of ideas; no one could do that. But he does remind us that intelligence and politics don’t have to be seen always as opposites.