K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
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 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,
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 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, 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).
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 (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.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13608
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 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,
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 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, 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).
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 (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.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13608
