The Tea Party movement just held its inaugural national convention with Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker. Throughout the United States, a grassroots surge of anger against President Obama has been gaining ground.
Separated from the formal Republican Party for the moment, the Tea Party movement appears to be a real political force to be reckoned with in America.
Part of the anger of the movement is against the intellectualism of the President. “We don’t need a university lecturer as our leader,” is one of their popular appeals. Populism in this sense is not just anti-socialism or thinly veiled racism; it is an appeal to anti-intellectual forces.
The United States witnessed the Know Nothing Party in the 1840’s and 1850’s, and Dwight Eisenhower’s campaigns of 1952 and 1956 against Adlai Stevenson certainly had a touch of this brand of populism.
The frustration of the Tea Party followers points to a disconnect between the President and certain citizens. Barack the Yuppie and Editor of the Harvard Law Review is vilified, not Obama the community organizer in the streets of Chicago.
What is President Obama to do? Is he to play down his intellectual capacities and change his vocabulary as did President George W. Bush, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Business School? I would suggest the advisors around President Obama screen the movie “Bobby”.
In it, there is a wonderful scene of Robert Kennedy listening to a poor coal miner in West Virginia. Bobby Kennedy, graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, son of a multimillionaire and former Ambassador to the court of St. James, is totally connected to the miner.
One knows that the miner feels he is talking to someone empathetic with his plight.
The Tea Party movement feeds on the frustration of those who feel they are not being listened to. The same can be said of similar movements throughout Europe and in Switzerland.
Politicians in democratic countries must be able to connect to the population. Anti-intellectualism is a manifestation of this disconnect and shows serious polarization not just between the right and left, but between government leaders and the population.
Lawrence Summers may have been the brightest economist at Harvard, but he has never been unemployed or elected to an office. His debacle as President of Harvard confirms the problem
Those around President Obama would also do well to read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, the chilling condemnation of the intellectuals around John F. Kennedy who led the U.S. into the disastrous war in Vietnam.
For those who have forgotten or not read the book, Halberstam’s description of those around Kennedy was a searing indictment of arrogance and hubris. The Tea Party movement’s success is partially a reaction to the best and the brightest around Obama and his professorial style.
