Aside from perhaps Thomas Jefferson, America never found that combination in any of its presidents. Indeed, though Newt Gingrich might protest, intellectualism is a disqualifier today for at least one major party.
Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president who died last week at 75, always was acutely aware of his status as the world’s leading intellectual-politician. The playwright and dissident who helped usher in Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” in 1989 spent 14 years as his nation’s first post-Soviet president, presiding reluctantly over its dissolution in 1993 into two nations.
He was neither a great playwright nor a great politician, but he was good enough at both to become one of the most profound voices for morality in politics that the world ever has known.
Mr. Havel insisted that if you believe it with your mind, you must work at it with your hands.
“When Thomas Jefferson wrote that ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed,’ it was a simple and important act of the human spirit,” Mr. Havel told a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1990.
“What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words, it was his deeds as well.”
It is striking in these days of zero-sum politics, in which one side wins only to the extent that the other loses, to reflect on the words of a man who wrestled with evil — he spent more than five years in and out of Soviet jails — and came out insistent that government exists for the common good.
“Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas,” he told his countrymen in his first inaugural address in 1990. “It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.”
Mr. Havel, with his constitutionally limited powers as president, advocated for what he called a “civil society.” Others in the government had a more practical view of what the nation’s post-Soviet priorities should be — cashing in and catching up on everything they’d been unable to buy behind the Iron Curtain.
Mr. Havel engaged in running debates with the economist Vaclav Klaus, who would become Czech prime minister in 1992 and is now the Czech president. The first Vaclav was a dreamer and philosopher, the other a hard-nosed conservative and free-marketer, a far more practical platform for a politician.
As Mr. Havel’s health declined, Mr. Klaus’ views became ascendant. The Czech Republic is now one of the richest nations in Europe, but Mr. Havel mourned the loss of its soul. He said in a speech in 2000:
“(W)e are also living in the first atheistic civilization, in other words, a civilization that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in 10 or 15 years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important.”
Newt Gingrich does not approach the substance of Obama's thought and substance.
Newt would stumble on Giberson's the Anointed. The editorial board of The Rome News Tribune could do its pocket of the world a service and weigh the current malaise at Shorter College in the balance of The Anointed and ask Newt Gingrich how he would resolve the matter.
To represent Obama RNT could get in touch with Isabel Wilkerson, first black woman to win a Pulitzer for Non Fiction; and have her reflect on the values of the Thankful Baptist Church and how it shaped her character and how her world view differs from the narrow fundamentalism of Nelson Price and Gingrich refusal for all his blunderbust about a conversation with America; his reluctance to shine a light on the shallow mindset of a Nelson Price and Don Dowles as exposed by The Anointed.