I'd be curious to know if the visits to this site have fallen off today or if they will decline in days to come, now that the election is over. My guess -- and my fervent hope -- is that if there is any decline, it will be far less steep than some might have expected. The first sentence of this post holds the clue as to why interest in political reporting and commentary will probably be strongly sustained: curiosity. For whatever else the election of Barack Obama accomplishes or fails to accomplish, I think it has put an end to the nearly-decade-long Age of Incuriosity of the Bush administration. And, if we are lucky, his election will rekindle a passion to know about the world. We will have someone in the White House who is actually interested in the messy and endlessly fascinating reality of this planet and our species -- in science, in law, in literature, in psychology, in opposing opinions. This stands in wonderfully violent contrast to the Bush White House official who famously told Ron Suskind, of the New York Times Magazine, "We create our own reality," or words very much to that effect.
President-elect Obama has said he was going to bring more transparency to the workings of government -- a promise that, if kept, will surely increase curiosity about and engagement with the political process. It's true that audiences for the televised or online coverage of such events as budget subcommittee hearings -- the kind of transparency that Obama has more or less promised -- might be limited. But on the other hand, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the keen interest taken in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's imperial elimination of term limits in New York City -- the City Council meetings flooded with irate citizens -- was in part a spillover effect of a new political involvement generated by Obama's candidacy.
It has often seemed that President Bush and those around him actually disdained the idea of inquiry, experiment, and investigation -- or at the very least were wary of it. For eight long years it has been hard to criticize the idea of governing and acting "from the gut" -- if you did question that model, well, you weren't trusting your own "gut" and therefore were yourself not to be trusted. In real reality, as opposed to Bush reality, the gut is a slimy, primal place, and though gut instincts can serve us very well -- they tell us to recoil from cruelty, to run out of a burning house, to shun restaurant foods that are vertical and not horizontal, and to avoid most poetry readings -- they are, as we have seen, far less adept at dealing with the enormous complications of the global world. For them, we need the head -- the home of curiosity -- in very close consultation with the heart and the will.