Obama vs. Bush

From the NY times, post-win:

Mr. Obama wasted no time jetting to the next battleground state, landing in Portsmouth, N.H., around 4:30 a.m., writes the Chicago Tribune’s John McCormick.

Shortly after boarding a chartered aircraft in Des Moines, Iowa, Obama spoke with reporters for four minutes, before he excused himself to go sleep.

“Alright everybody. It is good to see you,” he said. “We had a good night. My throat is hoarse, but my spirits are good.”

Asked whether he was surprised by his relatively wide margin of victory, Obama said he was more proud about what he thought it showed about America. He called the win a “harbinger of what’s going to happen around the country.”

Not only can Obama speak proper english and can formulate complete sentences on the fly, he uses words like "harbinger." I'm so excited to be able to vote for an articulate person.

I doubt Bush knows the definition of harbinger. While not outrightly implying any connection between taste and intelligence, Bush's favorite piece of modern theater is 'Cats.'

In Frank Bruni's Ambling Into History, Bush is "affable and good-natured, but shallow and largely clueless about many aspects of the culture of the nation he heads," reports the New York Daily News.

"Bush viewed the musical 'Cats' as modern theater at its finest . . . and openly admitted that martial artist Chuck Norris was his favorite film actor."

Here's a snippet from a report on a foreign policy discussion in late November with Obama:

No presidential candidate in history -- not the polymath Thomas Jefferson, not the orator William Jennings Bryan, not the egghead Adlai Stevenson -- has ever uttered a sentence like this: "My mother was an anthropologist [and] the Margaret Mead reference I'm always hip to."

The speaker (no surprise) was Barack Obama, whose late mother, Ann Dunham, earned a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Hawaii. The Margaret Mead comment was sparked by a questioner who had announced that he was a former student of the author of "Coming of Age in Samoa." But the phrase "I'm always hip to" was pure Obama.

The exchange took place during a Tuesday morning foreign policy discussion here as Obama and his leading advisors gathered at a long table featuring the banner "Judgment to Lead." The implicit political message was, of course, that Obama's wisdom in initially opposing the Iraq war is a more relevant credential than the length of his career in national office. And the roster of experts (including former national security advisor Tony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice and Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor Samantha Power) were designed to underscore the message that a significant chunk of the Democratic Party's foreign policy elite supports Obama and not Hillary Clinton.

"This is a chronic problem in Washington. It has to do with our 30-second attention span. You want to get to know a country and figure out what are the interests and who are the players. You can't parachute in. Iraq is a classic example, and Iran now may be another example, where we are entirely isolated from these countries and have no idea what's going on. We don't have good intelligence on them. And we're basically making a series of decisions in the blind. And that is dangerous for us."

I want a person a thousand times more intelligent and compassionate than me in the White House. I don't want as Bill Maher aptly said, "a president I want to have a beer with."