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I don’t know how you can put Strauss and Obama together? There have been books written about the neoconservatives and Strauss (Strauss’ students in the two Bush Administrations) but why would they be interested in Obama? Yes, Obama lies, is charming, impious and reckless like the Alcibiades. There will the desecration of both public statutes and public trust. Tradition will be foisted out the window all for the pursuit of narcissistic personal glory. Demagoguery and democracy, Periclean Athenian style.

Now which Straussian thinks, like Socrates, he can tame this wild erotic child? Harvey Mansfield, Werner J. Dannhauser, Cliff Orwin, Harry V. Jaffa?

It was kind of a joke that started during the campaign when Obama was being hailed as a genius by some liberals and then with the Greek temple columns silliness at his convention speech. Whether he was speaking esoterically or just horsing around in his Cairo speech when he attributed the Italian Renaissance and the Scottish Enlightenment to Averroës, Sinbad, and Omar Khayyám , who knows...Anyone's guess. It's possible he read something like that at Columbia or Harvard, but he seems closer to Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and the Fabians. And postmodernist rather than Plato, most likely

Good that someone was paying attention. Of course, there could be some similarity between his ideas and those of a Philosopher-King dictatorship, as outlined in various readings of The Republic.

γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Good call. Maybe the One attended their meetings at the University of Chicago? On a Soros or Bill Ayers scholarship, of course.

I would tend to doubt Obama believes in the Great Chain of Being. The positivism, postmodernism, and Critical Legal Studies he was presented with at Columbia and Harvard wouldn't allow that. There might be other ways to interpret Obama's ideology and with different schools of political philosophy. There were a couple threads a while back relating Obama to Joachim of Fiore and someone suggested The New Science of Politics there as one possibility. Maybe someone remembers that discussion, with the One positioning himself at the head of another "Third Age" of the spirit. Molnar's Utopia: The Perennial Heresy was also mentioned. When Obama made the elitist comments about people in small towns being "bitter" and "clinging to religion" it seemed like there might be more to what he was thinking there which could have come from Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style. Maybe he imprinted with that at Columbia?

This part was pretty good: "Niccolo Machiavelli and Italian rollercoasters of the 16th Century through the lens of radical Marxist theory and Critical Theory to deconstruct the foundations of hegemonic Modernism"

I think they are having a similar Lacanian seminar at Yale. But isn't liberalism of the 1960s American and Obama variety just another form of "hegemonic Modernism" (according to such theorists)?