Word: litist
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...What the World Needs Now I appreciated Michael Kinsley's essay on the desirable leadership quality that is toxic to mention because of its allegedly élitist overtones: intelligence [Oct. 27]. I have long felt that U.S. presidential candidates, much like graduate students, should be subject to a preliminary examination in their area of expertise. Candidates should have some knowledge of, if not proficiency in, world history, religions, cultures, geography. As it is now, we assume the media and debates will ferret out deficiencies in candidates' education that might lead to serious, perhaps deadly decisions - and that is not always...
What the World Needs Now I appreciated Michael Kinsley's essay on the desirable leadership quality that is toxic to mention because of its allegedly élitist overtones: intelligence [Oct. 27]. I have long felt that U.S. presidential candidates, much like graduate students, should be subject to a preliminary examination in their area of expertise. Candidates should have some knowledge of, if not proficiency in, world history, religions, cultures, geography. As it is now, we assume the media and debates will ferret out deficiencies in candidates' education that might lead to serious, perhaps deadly decisions - and that is not always...
...tick off nearly as many populist boxes as Joe the Plumber: beefy, hails from the heartland, works with his hands. The kind of guy Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough lionize as "regular" and "real." If you can't convince Joe, then you, sir, are an élitist wuss...
...second desirable quality of leadership, especially now, is toxic even to mention for its allegedly élitist overtones: intelligence. Not necessarily anything as crude as raw IQ scores, though something closer to that than to the kind of mystical wisdom attributed to Ronald Reagan. Call it intellectual curiosity, perhaps, or a willingness to engage with complicated ideas. This financial crisis is extremely complicated. Surely the best and the brightest can screw up, as they famously did in Vietnam. But four decades later (and after eight years of George W. Bush), maybe we can agree that on balance it would...
...Obama doesn't do spontaneous combustion. And he's keenly aware of the deeper danger of fire for America's first black presidential nominee. Over the past 19 months, he's been attacked as a naive novice, an empty suit, a tax-and-spend liberal, an arugula-grazing élitist and a corrupt ward heeler, but the attacks that nearly derailed him involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, attacks designed to portray Obama as an angry black man. White America has embraced unthreatening African Americans like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith and Colin Powell, but this is still a majority...