Obama's intellectual side is still a mystery. We have been talking about Obama's crypto-Straussian Platonist alter ego since his esoteric comments about people being "bitter" and "clinging to religion" in the campaign. Although that seemed inspired by Richard Hofstadter, the liberal professor at Columbia University. And he could have picked it up from the George Soros Open Society Institute seminars, relying heavily on the Soros reading of Karl Popper and Kant. There seems to be a tension between his "inner Plato" and "inner Alinsky" in all of this.
Since the One is a Renaissance man, this should get interesting and you never know where it will lead next with Obama's Neo-Platonism. Maybe dramatic readings of The Book of the Courtier, Machiavelli, Dante, Erasmus, da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, Bessarion, Nicholas Cusanus, and Petrarch at the White House. As inspired by Ibn Rushd, Al-Ghazali, Hassan-i-Sabah , Omar Khayyám , and The Arabian Nights, of course.
It would be cheaper for everyone to send him back to Harvard for four years to study with Harvey Mansfield to sort this all out in his mind.
