Revenge of the nerds

Sure, we all heard plenty this election season about the Bradley effect (the theory proposed to explain the discrepancies between election results and opinion polls in races involving one white and one nonwhite candidate, which implies people say they’ll vote for a nonwhite candidate but won’t actually do it).

But what about the Urkel effect?

Joel Stein wrote in Time days before the election: “The Urkel effect holds that voters leaning toward Obama will suddenly think, ‘I cannot take four years of listening to that giant-eared nerd.’”

Obviously neither effect, if existent in this election, was enough to keep Obama from the title of president-elect. But while the role his race played has been reiterated more than ‘Sarah Palin nude pictures’ has been Googled, not much attention has been paid to his nerdom.

For sure, the election of Barack Obama is notable because of his race. But this aspect overshadowed a no less important one: Obama is an unabashed, out-of-the-closet intellectual.

In a country where the population is more likely to believe in the existence of UFOs than the correctness of Darwinism and where only three-fourths of us can correctly name the country we gained our independence from, intelligence often goes unappreciated – and lacking intelligence is acceptable.

Sarah Palin’s allegeded mistaken belief that Africa is a country (and not a continent) might not be alarming to you if you’re amongst the fifth of the population that believe the sun actually revolves around the earth.

But maybe, just maybe, we have finally come to the conclusion that the ‘guy you’d wanna have a beer with’ might not be the most prepared to handle the largest economic disaster or our lifetime.

America has finally taken a step away from the anti-intelligence of the Bush administration, which consistently rejected expertise ranging from the opinions of reproductive health specialists to recommendations by Middle East experts.

We elected a nerd among nerds: an Ivy-League educated law professor. Obama graduated with Magna Cum Laude Honors from Harvard Law School (versus McCain who was 894th out of 899 in his graduating class at the Naval Academy). It would seem we are regaining a sense of appreciation for our nerds.

So now that we have confronted our social biases that have stuck with us since eighth grade gym class, surely we can all get behind our skinny, overly practical, philosophy-reading, emotionless president to reachieve American prosperity, right?

Of course, as Nicholas Kristof points out in the New York Times, Emperor Nero was amongst the most intellectual rulers of ancient times, and he castrated and married a slave boy who bared resemblance to his pregnant wife after he killed her (along with his mom and brother) and most likely set fire to Rome.

But at least we no longer have to place our trust in a guy who asks “is our children learning?”