This is Benjamin
obama the intellectual
November 20th, 2008 | benjamin
Now that America has elected Barack Obama to be the next president, a great deal of celebration has centred on the fact that Obama is a black man.
The persistent affection that the world maintains for the United States can be seen in the relief and satisfaction of many people that Obama will be the first African American to hold the most powerful position of leadership in the world.
And rightly so.
But another aspect of his election win receives less focus than it should. I am particularly heartened that Obama is an intellectual, and while this group by no means suffers the same discrimination faced by blacks and other ethnic minorities in the United States and around the world, they, or should I be so bold as to say we, face suspicion and hostility in a great many societies.
Obama edited Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School until becoming a United States senator. There is no way to predict in what specific ways these experiences will guide him in his role, it is reasonable to expect that he will bring his awakened critical faculties when making decisions.
He may be able to entertain other perspectives to his own, work strategically, and perhaps even see a world that exceeds in complexity the bipolar one depicted most recently by the Bush Administration.
But this not a mere rupture from his anti-intellectual predecessor. While previous United States presidents have been well educated, this has usually been a pretext to pursuing a political career. Bill Clinton, for example, was a Rhodes Scholar, but upon graduation began work on the McGovern presidential campaign, and four years later was already governor of Arkansas.
Obama, on the other hand, didn’t have any immediate party political trajectory. He toyed at being a writer, pursued change at the grass roots as a community organiser before realising that the most significant impact he could make would be in public life.
He just might bring to the presidency what I consider the role of all intellectuals: to engage the world in all of its complexity, to dream the world anew