Intellectuals on the Right are routinely accused of selling their souls to the devil and sacrificing their independent judgment in order to give conservative leaders cover. But which province of egghead-land is suspending disbelief now in order to indulge a high-brow hysteria not seen since Harvard decamped to the Potomac under Good King Jack?

Camelot-fever is raging out of control among the high-minded dilettantes of the Republic.

“Barack Obama is not the Messiah,” concedes Newsweek’s Jon Meacham, “and Biden is no Simon Peter, but it stretches credulity to say that Obama is no more qualified to be president than Palin is.”

Why is that, Jon?

Meacham puts weight on the Katie Couric interview in which Palin flubbed the question about Supreme Court cases. But Biden thinks F.D.R. went on TV to rally Americans after the crash of ’29. If such gaffes are disqualifying, then Obama’s own qualifications are in doubt. Bloggers have pointed to his interview with Tim Russert two years ago:

MR. RUSSERT: You write in your book this: “I also think my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised.” Which programs?
SEN. OBAMA: Well, you know, I think that if you look at how our health care system is structured right now — I’m, I’m a big supporter of Medicaid and Medicare, but I think that there’s no doubt that we could squeeze more efficiencies out of those, those systems there. Simple example, we don’t, we don’t use electronic billing for Medicare and Medicaid providers. Now, the—there’s no other business on earth that still has people filling out paper forms to get reimbursed, especially for a system that large. We could drastically reduce the costs of those systems.

Well, you know, I think that if you look at the answer, you will find that boilerplate about computerizing records evades the question. Though he thinks that the billing systems of Medicaid and Medicare can be improved, he clearly believes that the programs work, and is unable to name any that don’t.

What drives the intelligentsia’s hero worship of the junior senator from Illinois?

Could it be his experience of high office, that intimidating 23-month advantage he enjoys over Palin? The independent spirit and good judgment that led him to acquiesce for years in the iron rule of the Daley Machine and in the fashionable America-hating mores of radically chic Chicago?

Of course Obama, unlike Palin, has a graduate degree. (I always forget where Reagan and Truman got theirs.) He was president of the Harvard Law Review. Question: Have you ever read (all the way through to the end, no skipping) a leading article in the Harvard Law Review?

When Franklin Roosevelt returned to Groton in 1934 as president, one of his classmates, pondering the rise of the hero, said that he never could understand “this thing about Frank.” Like many conservatives, I continue to be puzzled by the mandarin classes’ “thing about Barack.”

True, he can give a good speech. So can Sarah Palin. He was a community organizer and a state legislator. She was a mayor and has experience in business. He inspires his base. She inspires hers. Why do so many intellectuals pronounce him supremely qualified, her not at all?

It must come down to the books. She hasn’t written any. He has written two. And intellectuals, who are all too easily seduced by certain kinds of poetry, reflexively adore literary style.

One of the books can be dismissed. The Audacity of Hope recites, in a manner calculated to give as little offense as possible to the tender-minded, a history of the policy debates of recent years. A lot of people bought the book, but how many read it cover to cover, no skipping? What is interesting in it is lost in deserts of tedious prose; you sense that a bunch of research memos prepared by the staff were reworked by the author into a book. As a specimen of assisted authorship (take a look at the acknowledgements page) it falls considerably short of the pièce de résistance of the genre, Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

Dreams from My Father is another matter. It is a good book, distinguished by the excellence of its style, the vividness of its characters, and the clarity of its portraiture. It is the work of a cultivated, curious, and introspective man seeking to understand himself.

His path to illumination will perplex some readers. Obama seems, at times, to think that he can understand himself as a black man only if he first comes to terms with the evil of the white man. Challenged by friends to say why he is reading a “racist tract,” Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he replies:

“It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.”
Regina blew on her coffee. “So why are you reading it?”
“Because it’s assigned.” I paused, not sure if I should go on. “And because—”
“Because . . .”
“And because the book teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me to understand how people learn to hate.”
“And that’s important to you.”
My life depends on it, I thought to myself.

Dreams of My Father is the youthful quest-book of an intellectual, and as such it helps explain the infatuation with Obama so conspicuously on display in the salons of nerd-dom. Many intellectuals who support him see their own qualities reflected in him; he gives a little boost to their amour-propre.

But intellectuals should be wary of anointing philosopher-kings. They have a poor record when it comes to judging character. Plato’s heart was broken by Dionysius of Syracuse. George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Wilson, and the New York Times’s Walter Duranty carried water for Stalin; Lincoln Steffens did the same for Lenin. Voltaire’s transactions with Frederick, Diderot’s with Catherine, Swift’s with Bolingbroke, were not wholly creditable to them. Alas, too few of Camelot’s courtiers are left to remind a younger generation of brain workers of the dangers of intellectual whoredom.

Palin is the perfect foil for the mandarin classes because she is not an intellectual. That makes her, in egghead world, less qualified than Barack. Yet very few presidents have been intellectuals. The Adamses to some extent; Jefferson of course; Madison maybe; Theodore Roosevelt certainly; Wilson possibly. (John Maynard Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, raises grave doubts about the quality of Woodrow’s intellect.)

A tendency to worship uncritically the stylish and more intellectualized forms of power is one of the vices of the intellectual caste. A tendency to overlook the virtues of leaders who have not written books or attended special finishing schools is another. Whenever he is tempted to dismiss a candidate like Sarah Palin, the conscientious egghead should first consult an entry in Emerson’s journal of June 1863:

Lincoln. We must accept the results of universal suffrage . . . . We shall have coarse men . . . . You cannot refine Mr Lincoln’s taste, or extend his horizon . . . . But this we must be ready for, and let the clown appear.

Five months later the clown composed the Gettysburg Address.

Memo to the intoxicated intelligentsia: It’s time to sober up. It’s also time to put the qualification debate aside. Given what we know now, both Obama and Palin are qualified to lead. The question for the voter is: in which direction do you want to be led? – Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.