…the truth is that there are reasons why Obama is a phenomenon, and one of them is that his political intelligence is so keen that he knows when unreality best serves his ends. Political intelligence is as distinct and intuitive a gift as any of the other kinds of intelligence—the situational intelligence of the athlete or the analytic intelligence of the intellectual—and a large component of political intelligence lies in being faithful to your own fictions.

- Adam Gopnik. Continue reading.

Photograph by Darcy Padilla/VU.