Literary elite dazzled by its own creation

""According to one gratifying myth recently circulating in the blogosphere, the key difference between Democratic and Republican voters is their recorded level of intelligence. This is an odd argument to advance from the vantage point of the historic party of the poor and educationally deprived, you might think. But then, when it comes to arguments about presumed levels of intelligence, factual veracity and logical consistency often play a minor role."

• (Voters forget they were not allowed to see one school record, grade for Obama. Nothing).

"This attitude, no doubt, is why so many people have vested such extravagant hopes in America's soon-to-be-inaugurated 44th president. He's awfully clever, we're told, and wildly articulate.

• Never mind that Barack Obama makes no claims to academic excellence or that his eloquence was drilled into him, not in ivy-clad college debating chambers, but out of the tempestuous sermons of his Chicago pastor. People will invent for themselves the politicians they want to have (or to hate).

The shimmering image of Obama we see in the media at the moment is not the man himself but, rather, a dim reflection of the commentators' grandiose self-image, adorned with the obscure glamour of a year-round suntan.

• As we might expect, then, (New Yorker political columnist) Hertzberg is presently the complete, teared-up and weeping Obamaniac. He has "followed the Obama phenomenon with the tracks of my tears", Hertzberg tells us in a post-election reverie on The New Yorker website. Indeed, in all his years he's "never been as emotionally invested in the fortunes of a politician as I've been in Obama's" - not even the Robert Kennedy of the fabled year 1968, with his "young, handsome, intense" looks and his "poetical-tragical-romantic story of personal transformation".

Yet Obama is definitively not a culture warrior. In his The Audacity of Hope, he recalled of the 2000 and 2004 elections that he "sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation played out on the national stage". And he expressed nostalgia for the old-world civility of those senior members of Congress who took him under their wings in his freshman years."...