by Richard Stern

Intellectual metabolism rates vary far more than physical ones. Some people understand more from glimpsing a street incident than others from years of living in a cauldron. A book read by a Shakespeare or a Lincoln may yield more than what accrues to most of us after reading through a library. To Joshua Speed, a friend who marveled at Lincoln's memory, Lincoln said, "You're mistaken--I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I've learned--My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out." This reader sometimes forgets page 231 when he's on page 235. To assay the experience of presidential candidates is not a simple matter of calculating the number of years in this job or that one, the length or frequency of their marriages, the number or distinction of their academic degrees. These are important and should be known and considered, but my guess, say, is that Barack Obama's boyhood years in an Indonesian school might be the equivalent of years of anthropological or ambassadorial presence in Jakarta, that his years at the racially mixed private school in Hawaii count for understanding of racial peace and strife as much or more than five years work at the NAACP, that his years of community work on Chicago's South Side, his subsequent terms in the Illinois and United States Senate, his lecturing at the U. of Chicago Law School close to such men as those of Cass Sunstein, Richard Posner, Douglas Baird, and Richard Epstein have taught him more about dealing with varieties of intellect than a dozen years of diplomatic intercourse in the capitals of Europe, Asia and Africa. I cannot gauge his patience, tolerance, equanimity, or charm (although my one encounter with him at a south side block party brought evidence of easy humor) but he has already met tests for these in his weeks of campaigning. As for administrative experience, he has far less than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and several thousand (hundred thousand?) other people, but isn't this deficiency at least partly negated by contemplation of the works of these experienced gentlemen. I don't intend this post to be an endorsement of Obama. I may well neither vote nor get a chance to vote for him in 2008. The intention here is to vault the hurdle of his inexperience.