Phil at Amicable Collisions quotes John Lewis Gaddis on grand strategy:

Finally, grand strategy requires great language. As the best leaders from Pericles through Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan have always known, words are themselves instruments of power. Their careful choice and courageous use can shake the stability of states, as when Reagan said, before anybody else, that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” headed for the “ash-heap of history.” They can also undermine walls, as when Reagan famously demanded, against the advice of his own speech-writers, that Gorbachev tear one down.

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art – which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings – and that consequences come from using them.

Here, here. And admittedly, this is one of the reasons, but by no means the only reason, why I like Barack Obama.

Some of Gaddis’ other points are also pertinent. For instance, the claim that Obama is merely an empty suit, speaking with vagueness and so forth, ties into another factor of the four Gaddis listed:

First, that grand strategy is, by its nature, an ecological enterprise. It requires taking information from a lot of different fields, evaluating it intuitively rather than systematically, and then acting. It is, in this sense, different from most academic training, which as it advances pushes students toward specialization, and then toward professionalization, by which I mean the ever deeper mastery of a diminishing number of things. To remain broad you’ve got to retain a certain shallowness – but beyond the level of undergraduate education and sometimes not even there, the academy is not particularly comfortable with that idea.

—not that I believe Obama is an empty suit, nor that I’m “hoping he is lying” as Lex insinuates. But there is a point, a real point, in being able to put together advisors who widely differ, not always among themselves but also in relation to Obama’s own stated principles and policies, for allowing horizontal thinking to occur: an ecological enterprise..requiring taking information from a lot of sources and evaluating them intuitively. So those who praise consistency etc. in McCain (despite certain flip-flops) may be looking for predictability in his foreign policy stance because predictability is safe. Gaddis again:

Third, grand strategy requires the ability to respond rapidly to the unexpected. It acknowledges that trends can reverse themselves suddenly, that “tipping points” can occur, and that leaders must know how to exploit them. The academy loves this sort of thing when it happens on the basketball court or the hockey rink. In the classroom, though, it resists the idea: instead the emphasis is too often on theory, which promises predictability, and therefore no surprises. That’s why the academy tends to be so surprised when events like the end of the Cold War and 9/11 take place. Leaders, like athletes, have to be more agile.

Have any of Obama’s detractors ever considered the possibility that Obama rhetoric, Obama vagueness, and Obama adaptability, may have effects on foreign leaders, friendly and hostile, similar to those effects witnessed to affect the American public?

Then again, some academics only want predictability; some go so far to imagine predictability where it is not, — after once trumpeting its absence — in order to make more palatable whatever storm they intuit on the horizon….but don’t know to be coming.