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Resignation and rationality

• Justin Webb
• 7 Apr 08, 09:36 AM GMT

There'll be tears in Georgetown. And rejoicing too. is a blow for Mrs Clinton and an opportunity - he is a good friend of course so his resignation and the rows surrounding it will be keenly felt - but his presence in her inner circle was little short of poisonous. Being charmless doesn’t matter when you are winning but when you are in the business of forging friendships or going down it does. He handicapped her. His resignation is an for a troubled senior team.

As for the that saw an end to the Penn dream: free trade is the underpinning of American prosperity. Dissing feels crazy to many Democrats. The gutsy approach would be for Clinton and Obama to campaign for it.

As for rationality in the race and in the United States more generally: in she begins with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… It expects what never was and never will be."

Jefferson was not attacking religion or religious belief. But the founding fathers did not intend that respect for religious freedom dulled a nation's wits to the extent that it could no longer tell fact from fiction. The issue is not religious belief, it is scientific knowledge. The two can coincide quite happily and my point is that after this year's election that coincidence will be found in the White House. And that leadership matters. Friends of America have - it seems to me - a legitimate concern when hearing that, for instance, one in five American adults believes the sun revolves around the earth; or that more than a quarter of US college graduates(!!) think all living things have always existed in their present form.

Or indeed that fewer than half of Americans read any work of fiction in 2001, of all years one in which the glorious balm of literature, its capacity to transcend any horror, might have been useful. But too many Americans - Jacoby argues and I have some sympathy for her - have no use for knowledge or learning. That is not religious faith; it is ignorance.

I suppose you could argue that America is still pre-eminent among nations even with this level of intellectual failure. There are millions of fantastically well-educated Americans and I think I am right in saying that most Nobel Science Prize winners choose to live here. But Jefferson still has a point.

So does Tarek Tbaileh and others who wrote on the subject of Muslims (as opposed to Muslim nations) and evolution. Good for them! Sorry for misrepresenting you.

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