Barack Obama has banished the knee-jerk anti-intellectualism of the Bush years, but he needs to make the change permanent

IF YOU liked George W. Bush, it wasn’t because of his brain. Bush was, rather notoriously, the president of quick decisions, few regrets and long vacations. He was the person you wanted to have a beer with, and whom you thought you could trust because he was a lot like you. In Stephen Colbert’s famous formulation, he was the epitome of “truthiness” – of knowing things not from books, but from the gut.

All this meant that Bush was widely reviled by …