[Vision2020] Obama's Strengths: Superb Intellect, Openness, and Pragmatism

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Greetings:

Hail to the New Chief!  This was this week's column, but only for the Los Cabos Daily News.  Idaho's financial crisis was more pressing, so for my Idaho venues I wrote a column on the grossly inadequate procedures that Idaho has for laying off faculty.  The file is attached as well as the full version of the Obama column.

Nick

OBAMA’S STRENGTHS: 
SUPERB INTELLECT, OPENNESS, AND PRAGMATISM

“Eggheads of the world unite. You have nothing to lose except your yolks”
--Adlai Stevenson

I was so busy consulting blogs and national newspapers on the internet before the election that I did not have time to read Barack Obama’s two books. It is rare that an American president has written a best selling memoir--Dreams from My Father--and a best selling policy statement--The Audacity of Hope--before taking office.

Both of Obama’s parents earned PhDs, and Obama has a law degree from Harvard.  Conservative Michael McConnell, a federal appellant judge appointed by George W. Bush, was so impressed by the way Obama edited one of his articles for the Harvard Law Review that he recommended Obama for a job at  the University Chicago Law School.

For twelve years Obama taught constitutional law at a school known for its conservative professors, such as current Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia. Obama was offered a tenured position there, but he turned it down in order to devote himself to public service. The Academy lost the services of a brilliant mind, but the nation and the world now have the benefit of an intelligent and bold leader.

The Audacity of Hope reads as one of his students described his classes. He has an in-depth grasp of the issues and he is not an ideologue, offering criticisms of both liberal and conservative viewpoints. Mary Ellen Callahan, now a Washington, D. C. attorney, remembered instructor Obama as "offending my liberal instincts."

In a 2004 column for the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, conservative pundit and former Reagan speechwriter, praised Bush as “the triumph of the seemingly average American man.  He is not an intellectual.  Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”  Noonan obviously “misunderestimated” the trouble that this clueless, average man could bring to the U.S. and to the world.

Noonan’s indictment of intellectuals is baseless.  An English philosopher named John Locke gave us the idea of three branches of government and the principle of religious tolerance.  Early American intellectuals such as Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln read Locke and other thinkers of the European Enlightenment and founded the most successful liberal democracy in world history.  

One of the best insights in The Audacity of Hope is Obama’s contention that some of today’s conservatives are so rigid that they have become absolutists.  He states that “there is an absolutism of the free market, an ideology of no taxes, no regulation, no safety net—indeed, no government beyond what’s required to protect private property and provide for the national defense.”

Pro-life absolutism has been very destructive of our social fabric of civility and respect. Doctors who offer legal abortions are targeted and sometimes shot, and vulnerable women have been harassed at family planning clinics. Anti-abortion restrictions on U.S. family planning aid has had disastrous effects on the reproductive health of women around the world.  

Abstinence programs that don’t work keep American teen pregnancy rates the highest in the world, forcing mothers bear children that they are incapable of raising and straining our health and welfare systems.

The facts are clear and compelling. Countries that offer comprehensive sex education, contraceptives, and abortion have much lower teen pregnancy and abortion rates, lower by as much as factor of ten in European welfare states.

There are absolutists in the area of health care, those who are willing to put up with worst health care in the industrialized world rather than accept any government health programs, including Medicare, which has far lower administrative costs than private insurance.

Obama finds it odd that some conservatives, whose leaders had always argued for the importance of law and order, would now support a president that acted contrary to the Constitution and international laws and conventions, some of which the U.S. had promoted.  

While he was in the Senate, Obama slowly realized that the Bush and his congressional allies believed that “the rules of governing no longer applied,” and that “habeas corpus and separation of powers were niceties that only got in the way.”

Obama sees American pragmatism embodied in Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party.  Lincoln saw the importance of government action where private initiative had failed or was inappropriate.  Lincoln signed bills giving public lands to settlers and railroads, and then promoted the Morrill Act so that these people would have access to the practical knowledge of our land-grant universities and send their children there for minimal fees.

Alan Brinkley sums up Obama’s promise very well: “The American people would do well, in the aftermath of this disastrous presidency, to consider the value of what may be an uninspiring, but certainly essential, quality of leadership: the ability to experiment, to make changes, to reconsider ideas and principles that fail to work, and to embrace the philosophy of pragmatism that is one of the few truly American contributions to the history of ideas.” 

I disagree with Brinkley only in the choice of the word “uninspiring.” Obama has shown that he can and will be an inspiring pragmatist.  Furthermore, let us hope that Obama is correct that this “pragmatic, nonideological attitude” will continue to be the view of “the majority of Americans.”

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.