Overreach

Carl Scott at Postmodern Conservative has an extremely thought-provoking (and quite long) post on the composite character story that broke out mid-last week.  Carl focuses much of the essay on the many conservatives who mocked the young Obama's struggle to deal with T.S. Eliot in a love letter to his then-girlfriend Alex McNear (here is the quote from an earlier post of mine).  Here is Carl's take:

A number of conservative commentators have used that quote in ways that make me squirm. They apparently hold an expectation that all real conservatives will regard it as ridiculous. NRO has a slide show that juxtaposes it against goofy young Obama toker photos. At Ricochet, Diane Ellis gives us this headline: Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious than Current Obama. Thankfully, many of the commenters there are much more charitable, sounding the obvious “didn’t a lot of us write embarrassing stuff in our college years” line, thereby showing us that Ricochet’s aim of fostering civil web discourse bears real fruit. But a far more typical conservative response is exemplified by that headline, and without the “may have been.” And that angers me. I know in a previous thread I said Obama was a faux intellectual, and received a partial correction from James Ceaser, but at least towards the younger Obama, I feel egg-head-ish solidarity, and resistance to the charge of pretentiousness.

Consider the quote.  Obama’s use of “he accedes to maintaining” admittedly displays a classic tick of trying-too-hard undergraduate writing. And there’s certainly a kind of a sketchy flirt in his getting into the sexual aspect. But what particularly jumps out is that this guy in his senior year is trying to be serious about literature, and doing a better job of it than most of us would have. I do not detect much calculation here about how to impress this woman; rather, I get the sense of a young man who is in a season of giving himself over, even obsessively so, to literature and things intellectual. Hints of Obama’s now well-known narcissism, or at least, tone-deafness with regard to how speak about himself, are already there, but still.

 [...]

And that is all the more why I denounce those conservatives who gleefully snipe at the purported weirdness or pretentiousness of a young ambitious man who—gasp!–apparently took T.S. Eliot and such seriously. Go back to your ESPN or your Larry the Cable Guy if Eliot is out of your league–stick with criticizing Obama’s decisions and speeches, and leave the intellectual dimension of his story to those of us who actually care and know about such matters.

We would actually be happy to learn that Obama was basically a B.S.-er on literary matters, something that these extracts do not prove, and in fact suggest otherwise. Because for us, the really unsettling (Lionel Trilling-like) question is the following: did his engagement with fine modern literature not give him any hesitations, as he successively got in bed with tactically-ruthless socialists, Chicago machine politicians, and black-nationalist “theologians”? Did it do so little for him?

I won't get into the rest of what Carl says--and he has a lot of important things to say (e.g., Shelby Steele is closer to living out Ralph Ellison's teachings than any of the modern civil rights leaders)--but this is definitely something worth thinking about.  As Carl argues, the fact that Obama tried to take Eliot seriously is not the problem (and conservatives attacking that aspect of it really fall into the stereotype liberals have created about them being dumb and stupid).  The problem is that he did not fully grasp the principles Ellison, Eliot, and others taught.  If he did, he might not be in the mess he is in right now.