Lexington

摘要

"Intellectual" is hardly the first word that springs to mind when you contemplate George Bush. Mr Bush glided through the best education that money can buy without acquiring much in the way of "book learning". At school, he formed a stick-ball team called the Nads (providing him and his pals with a chance to shout "Go Nads"); at Yale, he was famous for doing the alligator, a dance that involved falling on the floor and rolling around; at Harvard Business School, he wore cowboy boots and chewed tobacco, a strutting provocation to the lefty penseurs who dominated Harvard Yard. Yet for the past few months this paragon of good ol' boy common sense has been infatuated with a book about an abstract noun by a Jewish intellectual. Mr Bush recommends Natan Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror" (Public Affairs) to almost everyone he meets (including Condoleezza Rice, who mentioned the book during her opening remarks at her Senate confirmation hearing). Nine days after winning re-election he spent over an hour discussing the book in the White House with Mr Sharansky himself. The meeting must have sounded extraordinary, given Mr Sharansky's thick Russian accent and Mr Bush's Texan drawl. But by all accounts they got on famously.