Though I am one of Obama's staunchest critics on executive power, civil liberties, and the ways that his domestic agenda has privileged insiders and special interests, I cannot help but see and lament the instances when he's been a victim of the partisan mindset too. When Andrew McCarthy of National Review alleges that he is allied with our Islamist enemies in a "grand jihad" against America, or Dinesh D'Souza insists that his actions are explained by Kenyan anti-colonialism, they aren't just being unfair to Obama personally, which is of little matter; they are misleading their conservative readers (who don't study this stuff for a living) about reality. In so doing, these very smart men have made our national discourse needlessly dumber.

Unfortunately, another conservative is joining their ranks, or so I fear after reading "What Keeps This Failed President Above Water," an essay by David Gelernter, the brilliant Yale computer scientist. You can read more here about his intelligence and contributions to American life. Nothing I say in this post should call his substantial accomplishments into question. But like previous victims of "the partisan mind," his work on matters concerning ideology often lacks the rigor of his other output, and now he's offered a critique of Obama focused less on his policies and actions as president than in an imagined account of who Obama really is. I'd forgo an argument about something as unknowable as that except for the fact that Gelernter's notion of Obama isn't just unprovable, it is contradicted by available evidence.

There's no excerpt more telling or discrediting than this jaw-dropping assertion (emphasis on weasel words added):

He is post-religious: he took his family to a church where the religion seemed to be America-hatred. There are no biblical echoes in his speeches, as there have been in the speeches of so many presidents, left and right, and such other American leaders as Martin Luther King. "Pandering to religious nuts" is the way PORGIs [post-religious, globalist, intellectuals] analyze such references. Another way to describe them is quintessentially American.



We are, after all, a biblical republic. The idea of America -- freedom, equality, democracy, and America as the promised land -- grew straight out of the Bible. Obama is the first American president to put all that stuff behind him.



Skip past the reductive characterization of Trinity United Church of Christ. It is doubtless true that some GOP partisans believe Obama thinks religious people are nuts and has abandoned God. But how can a man as smart as Gelerntner possibly perceive and assert that there are "no biblical echoes" in Obama's speeches, and that unlike other presidents he has put all that God stuff behind him?

Obama came to national attention when he gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention.