New York Times Arts reporter Patricia Cohen has paused her patrolling of the intolerant conservative intellectual beat [1]
to flatter Obama and his fellow liberals on the front of the Thursday
Arts section.
Cohen profiled Harvard historian James Kloppenberg,
getting an ovation from an audience of Manhattan liberals for gushing
over President Obama the "pragmatic...open-minded" intellectual: "In Writings Of Obama, A Philosophy Is Unearthed [2]."
When the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg decided to write about the influences that shaped President Obama's view of the world, he interviewed the president's former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays, and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Mr. Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review ("a superb cure for insomnia," Mr. Kloppenberg said). What he did not do was speak to President Obama.
"He would have had to deny every word," Mr. Kloppenberg said with a smile. The reason, he explained, is his conclusion that President Obama is a true intellectual - a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.
In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition," Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.
It's
significant that Kloppenberg doesn't claim to have read any of Obama's
actual articles for the Harvard Law Review (though Cohen's fuzzy writing
doesn't make that clear). That's because Obama, elected president of
the Harvard Law Review in 1990, evidently only wrote one, a recap of a state court verdict [3]
which isn't exactly a deathless piece of prose and featured the less
than Lincoln-esque heading: "TORT LAW - PRENATAL INJURIES - SUPREME
COURT OF ILLINOIS REFUSES TO RECOGNIZE CAUSE OF ACTION BROUGHT BY FETUS
AGAINST ITS MOTHER FOR UNINTENTIONAL INFLICTION OF PRENATAL INJURIES."
Nonetheless,
Kloppenberg elevated Obama into the pantheon of presidential
intellectuals with his embrace of the philosophy of "pragmatism," which
"embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate."
"There's John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson," he said.
To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce....Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. "It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers," Mr. Kloppenberg said.
Clay Waters is director of Times Watch [4]. You can follow him on Twitter [5].