We Still Need Adlai Badly

One of the most depressing aspects of both major political parties circa 2007 is their utter lack of lack of intellectual seriousness. Not that we have had an unbroken string of intellectuals in public office -- far from it -- but at least in the 19th Century people actually read the candidates' speeches and politics was a national pastime. In our age of instant communication and 24/7 entertainment, however, politicians must appeal to our emotions, not our intellect, in order to get our attention. There is very seldom even the pretense of intellectual persuasion. Even the so-called presidential "debates" are little more than opportunities for the candidates to garner name recognition by reeling off clever one-liners, or trashing opponents with higher poll numbers. This is hardly a novel insight, but it's troubling nevertheless -- our leaders know their positions are seldom scrutinized by the public, so they don't have to withstand intellectual scrutiny. Whatever you think of Al Gore and his jeremiad against the Bush Administration ("The Assault On Reason"), his condemnation of the poll-driven manipulation of the American public at the expense of intellectual discourse is spot-on.

Let's begin with the Republicans. From the Goldwater debacle in 1964 through at least the Reagan Administration, the majority of innovative public policy proposals sprung from conservative think tanks; not all of them were good ideas, and most were never enacted into law, but that's where the action was. Even before then, President Eisenhower ran a sound and sober administration, ending the Korean War, constructing the national highway system, and facing down the British, French, and Israelis over Suez.

No more. Now we are faced with the sorry spectacle of a Republican president advocating amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit that mortal threat to the republic, gay marriage. Now were forced to endure the dismal display of Republican presidential candidates questioning evolution. This isn't what serious people in the twenty-first century do, particularly presidential candidates. Last year, when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote his long -- and bizarre -- letter to President Bush, the Administration didn't deem it worthy of a response. Why not? Lincoln answered Horace Greeley and other critics. A tightly reasoned, forthright defense of Western values would have heartened Iranian dissidents and improved the President's standing with our allies, or at least couldn't have hurt.

And the Democrats? They can boast of a proud history of leaders from FDR through JFK -- politicians of intellectual heft like Adlai Stevenson and William Fulbright. The Arkansas Senator's critique if American foreign policy in Vietnam, and of the sometime American habit of looking "at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism" is a legacy of which the Party is justly proud. (It is not so proud of his rigid segregationist views.) So too with Robert Kennedy: what politician today can we imagine having the physical courage to break the news of Dr. Martin Luther King's death to an African American audience, and the political courage to quote a Greek poet (Aeschylus) in an effort to assuage their grief? ("And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our own will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.")

Again, no longer. Hillary Clinton's lack of political courage and her willingness to say or d0 anything to get elected are shocking even for a politician. Her position on Iraq shifts with every shift in public opinion, while the Clinton spin machine spits out exactly what it thinks the media wants to hear. (This is why she has performed well in the "debates"; every syllable she utters is calculated to burnish her image.) John Edwards decided long ago to jettison his image as a moderate Southern Democrat and pander to the base. Neither has a coherent, consistent political philosophy.

Barack Obama intrigues me the most because he seems to appreciate the weight of history on the present and distrusts ideology. His opposition to the Iraq War, for example, was deeply conservative in the Burkean sense of the word, echoing Fulbright's condemnation of the strain of "angry moralism" in U.S. foreign policy: "[W]hen our idealism spills into that kind of naivete and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.” (I will revisit the Senator from Illinois in another post.)

Senator Obama is an exception, unfortunately -- as are original Republican thinkers such as Newt Gingrich -- very few "eggheads" like Adlai Stevenson run for president anymore. But the problems that confront the country are complex and multifaceted, and do not lend themselves to simple solutions. I think the country is ready for someone smarter than the rest of us.