Post-Modern Philosopher of Pragmatism (Deflated) Obama/On Prof. Kloppenberg's Book

The New York Times has helpfully provided us an insight into the mind of the President, or at least his intellectual history as perceived by a Harvard historian Mr. James T. Kloppenberg. Professor Kloppenberg has invested a substantial amount of time in discovery of the philosophical influence that shaped the Mr. Obama's personal philosophical outlook although one might cringe at the idea of an historian extracting philosophical influences from the Jakarta to Cambridge via Hawaii history of the President. Kloppenberg believes Obama is a deflated philosopher of pragmatism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/books/28klopp.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

It is helpful to know that rare academic speculative intellectuals such as Max Weber and Fredrich Neitzsche shaped the ideas of the President as well as Chicago anarchists and Weather Underground bombers. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced 'purse'), William James and the post modernist philosophical pragmatist linguistic wise-guy John Dewey are mentioned in the review of Kloppenberg's speech at The City University of New York's Graduate Center as influences in the intellectual portrait of the President as a young man.

We are not convinced that there is much intellectual content in the list of individuals cited as providing philosophical manure relevant for management of national interests today. The growth of the Presidential critical theory of pragmatic post-modernist anomie, chaos and detachment from historical insight for philosophical purposes appears a limited philosophical selection . If the President did not read Wolfe's Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers perhaps he read the works of Joseph Kenyatta and a life of Muhammad as well as the transcendentalists. Maybe he never watched television.

A simple Quinian post-modernist presentation of ontological relativity and philosophy of logic would suffice to persuade us that a President has a competence in language and logic, yet knowledge of human history and of real interests may not be as readily compressed to a theoretical formula and reduced to meaningless political subjectivity. That sort of pragmatism creates an ineffective bureaucratic net loss budgeting deleterious to the environment, sovereignty, social welfare and security lacking in reformative vigor.