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Barack Obama's Smart Speech "A More Perfect Union": Did It Reveal Him To Be
Too Intellectual To Be President?
By John W. Dean
Created Mar 22 2008 - 11:14am
By way of disclaimer, I do not have a favored candidate in the 2008
Democratic nomination contest. But I do appreciate the new (or perhaps
simply long-forgotten) and higher levels to which Senator Barack Obama is
taking political discourse. His historic speech on race [1] this week, for
example, was as smart as they come.
There was a time in this country when political debate was actually rather
sophisticated, but that was long ago (for as mass media grew, the level of
debate went down). Only time will tell, however, if Obama's powerful speech
was also politically smart.
Obama Speech Was Frank, Direct, and Intelligent - But Was It Pitched to Too
Advanced an Audience?
With his speech addressing race in America, Obama has done something that
few politicians are willing to do: speak with compelling intellectual
honesty. Rather than fuzzy-up difficult and troubling questions about race,
he confronted them directly. Rather than avoiding issues that are typically
ignored, he brought them forward for public discussion. Most strikingly, he
did this with nuance, great tact, and conspicuous intelligence.
Many commentators were struck by the level of erudition Senator Obama
employed in his speech. For example, Newsweek's Howard Fineman asked, "Did
the blockheads understand it?" Not wanting to sound elitist, Howard quickly
added that of course, everyone is a bit of a blockhead. I do not know if
everyone understood the speech or not, but I do know that it is a pleasure
to have a candidate running for the highest office in the land who is not
only not trying to pretend to be dumb and inarticulate but rather willingly
showing he is, in fact, smart as hell.
Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech was not unlike his insightful and
somewhat erudite books - Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope - with
one large exception: Relatively few people will read Obama's books but many
have been (or may be) exposed to his historic speech.
Computers have made it rather simple to determine the intelligence or grade
level of a speech by measuring it with the Flesch-Kincaid test [2], which is
found on the Tools/Options menu of Microsoft Word. This widely-employed
measurement device determines the degree of difficulty of the written (and
spoken) word.
Enterprising linguists and others have applied the test to a wide variety of
material. For instance, the folks at youDictionary [3] have tested the
inaugural addresses of presidents. They discovered that no president since
Woodrow Wilson has come close to delivering speeches pitched at a 12th grade
level. Bush II's first inaugural address was at a 7.5 grade level, which
ranked him near Eisenhower's second address (7.5), Nixon's first (7.6),
LBJ's only (7.0), and FDR's fourth (8.1). Clinton's two addresses, by
contrast, scored at the 9th grade level (9.4 and 8.8 respectively).
I tested Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech and it scores at a 10.5 grade
level, which by current standards is in the stratosphere. But maybe he was
being too smart to win the presidency.
Republicans Have Dumbed Down the Presidency
Hillary Clinton - who is every bit Obama's intellectual equal - is
increasingly running against his eloquence, and claiming that eloquence is
all he has and that he is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief and
solve real-world problems. During and since the Ohio and Texas primaries,
I've noticed that Senator Clinton has been showing less and less of her own
conspicuous wonkiness and brain-power, a strategy that seems to be working
to her advantage.
Senator Clinton's new populism has not become anti-intellectual (yet), but
she surely knows that her husband hid his intelligence during his
presidential campaigns, playing up his good ole boy roots rather than his
Yale/Oxford credentials. Savvy Democrats understand they cannot win the
White House by appearing smarter than their GOP opponent.
This is not a cynical observation, but rather a factual one. Republicans
have spent the past half century dumbing-down the American presidency, for
it has helped them win the White House Colleen Shogan, wearing her political
scientist hat [4], has assembled epigrammatic case studies demonstrating the
effectiveness of the anti-intellectualism of Republican presidents Dwight
Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.
For example, when Dwight Eisenhower ran against Illinois Governor Adlai
Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956), Eisenhower ignored the fact that he had been
first in his class at West Point and president of Columbia University.
Meanwhile, his surrogates portrayed Stevenson as an "egghead" intellectual,
which was untrue but easy to do given Stevenson's remarkably eloquent
speaking style. (In fact, Stevenson had flunked out of Harvard Law School,
although he later graduated from Northwestern Law School.) In office, too,
Eisenhower governed with a "hidden hand," continuing to hide his
intelligence.
Reagan was seen as an "amiable dunce," and history is still not sure if his
Alzheimer's condition took hold well before he left office. Yet his
collected letters demonstrate more thoughtfulness and policy savvy, at least
earlier in his life, than many suspected. George Bush reminded Yale students
when visiting his alma mater that "to the C students - I say, you, too, can
be President of the United States." In contrast, rival John Kerry's campaign
(mistakenly it now seems) had taken pains to portray him as highly
intelligent - yet Kerry's Yale grades were just as weak as Bush's. The
putative GOP nominee for 2008, John McCain, follows in the Republican
tradition of anti-intellectualism, as the fifth man from the bottom of his
Naval Academy graduating class.
Increasingly, conservatives seek to characterize liberals as latte-drinking,
white-wine sipping, Volvo-driving, intellectual elitists with whom no real
American would want to spend time, for they are too smug and superior to
truly understand others outside their circle. Conservatives may appreciate
intelligence but not intellectuals and their kind, and as the Republican
Party has become more conservative, its anti-intellectualism has become more
pronounced. The reason: It wins elections.
Hopefully Obama Will Not Shift His Strategy toward Playing Dumb
Senator Obama's smart speech on race is true to his campaign theme of
"change," for he is departing from the contemporary, Republican-created norm
of Forrest Gump presidential politics. Do Americans really want the dumbest
candidate answering the phone at three o'clock in the morning? Of course
not.
While the correlation between Presidents' successfully leading the nation
and their intelligence cannot be easily measured, University of California
psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has examined this question in his study
"Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership:
Estimates and Correlations for 42 U.S. Chief Executives" (partially
available online [5]).
Using complex statistical and analytical tools, Professor Simonton has
estimated the IQs of all our presidents. For example, for the last sixteen
presidents he estimated (and I have rounded his figures) the following IQs:
Wilson (155), Harding (140), Coolidge (142), Hoover (142), F. Roosevelt
(151), Truman (140), Eisenhower (145), Kennedy (160), L. Johnson (141),
Nixon (143), Ford (140), Carter (157), Reagan (142), G. H. W. Bush (143),
Clinton (159), and G. W. Bush (139). With the exception of LBJ, the
Democrats have provided the country with much higher wattage than the
Republicans. But clearly, none of these men are stupid.
Let's hope that Senator Obama continues to be willing to publicly perform at
his intelligence level. Perhaps he will trust voters to realize that the key
criterion to serve in the highest office should not be which candidate is
the person with whom you would most enjoy having a beer. To the contrary,
presidents should not be encouraging C students to continue to earn Cs so
they can become president. Presidents should be telling all Americans that
we can do better - which is one of the core points in Obama's message.
Anti-intellectual Republican presidents have led this nation into a new age
of unreason, as former Vice President Al Gore argued in The Assault on
Reason (2007) and more recently, Susan Jacoby has reported in The Age of
Unreason [6] (2008). As Senator Obama campaigns, he can truly change America
by simply refusing to play dumb. That strategy, if Obama continues it, may
turn out to be not only courageous but also wise, for it is very possible
that, after so many years, Americans are tired of having their innate
intelligence insulted by their presidential candidates.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
Too Intellectual To Be President?
By John W. Dean
Created Mar 22 2008 - 11:14am
By way of disclaimer, I do not have a favored candidate in the 2008
Democratic nomination contest. But I do appreciate the new (or perhaps
simply long-forgotten) and higher levels to which Senator Barack Obama is
taking political discourse. His historic speech on race [1] this week, for
example, was as smart as they come.
There was a time in this country when political debate was actually rather
sophisticated, but that was long ago (for as mass media grew, the level of
debate went down). Only time will tell, however, if Obama's powerful speech
was also politically smart.
Obama Speech Was Frank, Direct, and Intelligent - But Was It Pitched to Too
Advanced an Audience?
With his speech addressing race in America, Obama has done something that
few politicians are willing to do: speak with compelling intellectual
honesty. Rather than fuzzy-up difficult and troubling questions about race,
he confronted them directly. Rather than avoiding issues that are typically
ignored, he brought them forward for public discussion. Most strikingly, he
did this with nuance, great tact, and conspicuous intelligence.
Many commentators were struck by the level of erudition Senator Obama
employed in his speech. For example, Newsweek's Howard Fineman asked, "Did
the blockheads understand it?" Not wanting to sound elitist, Howard quickly
added that of course, everyone is a bit of a blockhead. I do not know if
everyone understood the speech or not, but I do know that it is a pleasure
to have a candidate running for the highest office in the land who is not
only not trying to pretend to be dumb and inarticulate but rather willingly
showing he is, in fact, smart as hell.
Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech was not unlike his insightful and
somewhat erudite books - Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope - with
one large exception: Relatively few people will read Obama's books but many
have been (or may be) exposed to his historic speech.
Computers have made it rather simple to determine the intelligence or grade
level of a speech by measuring it with the Flesch-Kincaid test [2], which is
found on the Tools/Options menu of Microsoft Word. This widely-employed
measurement device determines the degree of difficulty of the written (and
spoken) word.
Enterprising linguists and others have applied the test to a wide variety of
material. For instance, the folks at youDictionary [3] have tested the
inaugural addresses of presidents. They discovered that no president since
Woodrow Wilson has come close to delivering speeches pitched at a 12th grade
level. Bush II's first inaugural address was at a 7.5 grade level, which
ranked him near Eisenhower's second address (7.5), Nixon's first (7.6),
LBJ's only (7.0), and FDR's fourth (8.1). Clinton's two addresses, by
contrast, scored at the 9th grade level (9.4 and 8.8 respectively).
I tested Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech and it scores at a 10.5 grade
level, which by current standards is in the stratosphere. But maybe he was
being too smart to win the presidency.
Republicans Have Dumbed Down the Presidency
Hillary Clinton - who is every bit Obama's intellectual equal - is
increasingly running against his eloquence, and claiming that eloquence is
all he has and that he is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief and
solve real-world problems. During and since the Ohio and Texas primaries,
I've noticed that Senator Clinton has been showing less and less of her own
conspicuous wonkiness and brain-power, a strategy that seems to be working
to her advantage.
Senator Clinton's new populism has not become anti-intellectual (yet), but
she surely knows that her husband hid his intelligence during his
presidential campaigns, playing up his good ole boy roots rather than his
Yale/Oxford credentials. Savvy Democrats understand they cannot win the
White House by appearing smarter than their GOP opponent.
This is not a cynical observation, but rather a factual one. Republicans
have spent the past half century dumbing-down the American presidency, for
it has helped them win the White House Colleen Shogan, wearing her political
scientist hat [4], has assembled epigrammatic case studies demonstrating the
effectiveness of the anti-intellectualism of Republican presidents Dwight
Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.
For example, when Dwight Eisenhower ran against Illinois Governor Adlai
Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956), Eisenhower ignored the fact that he had been
first in his class at West Point and president of Columbia University.
Meanwhile, his surrogates portrayed Stevenson as an "egghead" intellectual,
which was untrue but easy to do given Stevenson's remarkably eloquent
speaking style. (In fact, Stevenson had flunked out of Harvard Law School,
although he later graduated from Northwestern Law School.) In office, too,
Eisenhower governed with a "hidden hand," continuing to hide his
intelligence.
Reagan was seen as an "amiable dunce," and history is still not sure if his
Alzheimer's condition took hold well before he left office. Yet his
collected letters demonstrate more thoughtfulness and policy savvy, at least
earlier in his life, than many suspected. George Bush reminded Yale students
when visiting his alma mater that "to the C students - I say, you, too, can
be President of the United States." In contrast, rival John Kerry's campaign
(mistakenly it now seems) had taken pains to portray him as highly
intelligent - yet Kerry's Yale grades were just as weak as Bush's. The
putative GOP nominee for 2008, John McCain, follows in the Republican
tradition of anti-intellectualism, as the fifth man from the bottom of his
Naval Academy graduating class.
Increasingly, conservatives seek to characterize liberals as latte-drinking,
white-wine sipping, Volvo-driving, intellectual elitists with whom no real
American would want to spend time, for they are too smug and superior to
truly understand others outside their circle. Conservatives may appreciate
intelligence but not intellectuals and their kind, and as the Republican
Party has become more conservative, its anti-intellectualism has become more
pronounced. The reason: It wins elections.
Hopefully Obama Will Not Shift His Strategy toward Playing Dumb
Senator Obama's smart speech on race is true to his campaign theme of
"change," for he is departing from the contemporary, Republican-created norm
of Forrest Gump presidential politics. Do Americans really want the dumbest
candidate answering the phone at three o'clock in the morning? Of course
not.
While the correlation between Presidents' successfully leading the nation
and their intelligence cannot be easily measured, University of California
psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has examined this question in his study
"Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership:
Estimates and Correlations for 42 U.S. Chief Executives" (partially
available online [5]).
Using complex statistical and analytical tools, Professor Simonton has
estimated the IQs of all our presidents. For example, for the last sixteen
presidents he estimated (and I have rounded his figures) the following IQs:
Wilson (155), Harding (140), Coolidge (142), Hoover (142), F. Roosevelt
(151), Truman (140), Eisenhower (145), Kennedy (160), L. Johnson (141),
Nixon (143), Ford (140), Carter (157), Reagan (142), G. H. W. Bush (143),
Clinton (159), and G. W. Bush (139). With the exception of LBJ, the
Democrats have provided the country with much higher wattage than the
Republicans. But clearly, none of these men are stupid.
Let's hope that Senator Obama continues to be willing to publicly perform at
his intelligence level. Perhaps he will trust voters to realize that the key
criterion to serve in the highest office should not be which candidate is
the person with whom you would most enjoy having a beer. To the contrary,
presidents should not be encouraging C students to continue to earn Cs so
they can become president. Presidents should be telling all Americans that
we can do better - which is one of the core points in Obama's message.
Anti-intellectual Republican presidents have led this nation into a new age
of unreason, as former Vice President Al Gore argued in The Assault on
Reason (2007) and more recently, Susan Jacoby has reported in The Age of
Unreason [6] (2008). As Senator Obama campaigns, he can truly change America
by simply refusing to play dumb. That strategy, if Obama continues it, may
turn out to be not only courageous but also wise, for it is very possible
that, after so many years, Americans are tired of having their innate
intelligence insulted by their presidential candidates.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson