Before last night’s presidential debate, the pundits were saying that Obama had to be less “professorial” and “nuanced” than in his prior debates.  And the post-mortems today seem to indicate that he was successful on this count.  Call it self-serving, but I dislike the implication that being professorial should be regarded as disabling for a presidential candidate.  To be sure, this view has deep roots in our political culture.  For instance, in lieu of watching the debate last night, I attended the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s production of a 1945 play, State of the Union, in which a neophyte presidential candidate is repeatedly urged by his handlers to avoid specifics and dumb down the language in his campaign speeches.  I take it that this view reflects, at least in part, an assumption that uninformed voters want to be reassured that the world is a simple place; that public policy questions have clear, easily comprehensible right answers; and that their own intuitive, emotion-driven responses are as sound a basis for making policy judgments as expertise and rigorous analysis.  The assumption may or may not be true–perhaps uninformed voters would rather be educated than pandered to–but indulging the assumption ultimately does a disservice to the quality of our political culture and democratic processes.

I don’t think I’ve heard of a cabinet member kneeling in the White House since Henry Kissinger did it in 1974. I’m only slightly less surprised by the fact that I’m on the same side of a contested issue as John Boehner and Newt Gingrich, of all people.