Exulting in complexity, speaking in paragraphs

From Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times:
Obama and the War on Brains:

...The second most remarkable thing about [Barack Obama’s] election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life….
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At least since Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1950s, it’s been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too learned. Thoughtfulness is portrayed as wimpishness, and careful deliberation is for sissies. The social critic William Burroughs once bluntly declared that “intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.”
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An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and … that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.
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Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites.…
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[A]s Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.

From Frank Rich’s column in the New York Times:
It Still Felt Good the Morning After:

…The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

In the news...

All 23 CSU campuses may turn away students:

CSU Chancellor Charles Reed blamed the proposed enrollment restrictions on Sacramento's underfunding of the university's budget, which was cut in September and now faces a midyear cut as the state's financial woes worsen.

The university's governing Board of Trustees is scheduled to discuss Reed's proposal Wednesday during a meeting at CSU headquarters in Long Beach. The trustees also will be asked to consider increasing tuition for business school graduate students.

While individual campuses have closed enrollment in the past, such a move has never been imposed across the entire system, which is the largest four-year university operation in the country. The proposal does not estimate how many students could be denied admission, but it could be thousands….

Prop. 8 protestors march in O.C. without incident:
Hundreds attend the rallies in Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach.

The statewide protest against a freshly approved ban on same-sex marriage spread south on Saturday, as hundreds opposed to Proposition 8 walked streets in two coastal Orange County cities.

In Laguna Beach, more than 1,100 people met in front of City Hall and then marched to the beach, where they crowded along Coast Highway. The demonstrators waved signs and chanted slogans from the shoulder of the highway, and police briefly blocked the southbound lane closest to them.

The demonstrators in Laguna Beach were met with thumbs-up signs, cheers and honking horns. The city voted more than two to one against Proposition 8, and its mayor, Jane Egly, helped kick off Saturday's march by telling the crowd, “We must continue the long struggle.”….