Michael Kinsley writes that America's never had a president who was not an 'intellectual snob.' Do people really want a stupid president?

Whenever Democrats raise the issue of growing income inequality or oppose some tax cut skewed to the rich, Republicans accuse them of “class warfare.” Meanwhile, though, Republicans have done rather well fighting the class war themselves on two different fronts: first, protecting the interests of Big Money in all of its forms; and second, shifting the target from financial to cultural and intellectual elites.

The last two Republican presidents — both named George Bush, both Andover, both Yale — were especially brilliant at painting their opponents as Ivy-covered elitists and themselves as jes’ folks.


It’s been hard, though, to figure out how to use this strategy against the first black president, especially one with Barack Obama’s amazing life story. But Michael Gerson — formerly George II’s speechwriter and now a Washington Post columnist — has found a way. In a column Tuesday, he picks up on a few words Obama uttered recently to a group of Democratic donors and calls the president an “intellectual snob.”

This puts us in the fashionable world of “umbrage politics,” where the game is to take as much offense as possible at something someone said or did. Usually this will involve giving the controversial statement or action an interpretation, or at least an importance, your victim obviously never intended and hiding the obvious fact that — far from being “saddened” or “outraged” — you are delighted to have this stick to beat him or her with.

Obama said that “facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day” at the moment “because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.” Gerson riffs on this: “Obama views himself as the neocortical leader — the defender … of cognitive reasoning. His critics rely on their lizard brains — the location of reptilian ritual and aggression.” In short, he takes this single sentence from the president, deconstructs it thoroughly enough to qualify for tenure in many an English department and calls the result “some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president.” Then he goes to town. Obama’s snobbery “destroys the possibility of political dialogue” (with all those eager Republicans, I guess). He is “abandoning American ideals.” He is “in the throes of pseudo-science.” It’s his fault if “reactionary populism ... targets minorities, immigrants and intellectuals.”

Astonishingly, halfway through this rant, Gerson declares, “Not that there is anything wrong with this. Some of my best friends are intellectual snobs.” He might not even deny that he is one himself, going on as he does in this piece about “unpacking” Obama’s prose and neuroscience and “reductionism” and evolution and all that kinda stuff. It’s just that intellectual snobbery is bad politics.

If an intellectual snob is someone who secretly thinks he’s smarter than the average Joe, we’ve probably never had a president — even Harry Truman — who wasn’t one. It’s true, I think, that Obama hides it worse than most. But having a president who thinks he’s smart, and shows it, is a small price to pay for having a president who really is smart. Or would people really rather have a stupid president?

Oh sure, there are people in places like Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley, Calif., still pining for Adlai Stevenson, who think that being smart is everything — in life and in a president. It’s not. But it’s not nothing, either, let alone a negative.

In the remarks that Gerson has seized on, and in remarks to donors that got him in similar trouble during the campaign (about how in tough times, disgruntled voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”), Obama clearly thought he was being sympathetic. People on the other side of the political divide are not evil or stupid (two alternative explanations), he was telling his Democratic audience. They’re merely under pressure. But it’s hard to make that point without seeming to say that in fact they are stupid. Obama did not put it well. (People tend to resent sympathy; what they want is empathy.)

Apparently, he still hasn’t learned. In a vestigial attempt to say something interesting, he threw away the script. He went off-message. The real lesson here is that presidents should never say anything just because it pops into their heads. Everything must be planned, discussed, rehearsed in advance. This is why presidents have speechwriters, every one of whom, throughout history, has secretly been convinced that he or she is smarter than the president.