Kloppenberg then goes on to discuss the range of thinkers Boesche discussed in those courses. As a matter of fact, those courses from Boesche lay the foundation for Kloppenberg's major claim that Obama as a political thinker should be aligned with the American tradition of pragmatist philosophy.
Because Trump and Breitbart have urged us to evaluate Obama as a student worthy of admission to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, let us pause here and measure him against George W. Bush and John Kerry in their respective first and second years of study at Yale University. Did Bush and Kerry in their first two years at Yale take two year-long courses in history and political theory from the same professor? I seriously doubt it. By all accounts, Bush and Kerry were not pulling down B's.
Next, we should raise comparable questions about Trump and Breitbart and their respective undergraduate educations.
For his first two years as an undergraduate, Trump attended Fordham University, the Jesuit university in the Bronx. But did he take two year-long courses in history and political theory from the same professor that were comparable in scope to the courses Obama took from Boesche? Based on my own Jesuit undergraduate education elsewhere about the same time, I seriously doubt if Trump did. He may have taken a year-long course in the history of Western civilization. But from Kloppenberg's description of the two year-long courses that Obama took from Boesche, I seriously doubt if Trump took two comparable year-long courses at Fordham. When Trump transferred to the University of Pennsylvania for his junior and senior undergraduate years, he studied in the Wharton School there, which is not famous for offering year-long courses in history and political theory. He graduated in 1968 with a bachelor of science degree in economics with a concentration in finance.
According to the Wikipedia entry about Breitbart, he graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1991. But according to the Wikipedia entry, the "epiphany" in his life did not occur during his studies at Tulane, but during the Clarence Thomas hearings in the summer of 1991.
Next, I want to discuss what I see as the major implication of Kloppenberg's claim that Obama the political thinker should be aligned with American pragmatist philosophy, which for Kloppenberg is exemplified in William James and John Dewey. Kloppenberg is right. Obama prides himself in not being ideological, but in being pragmatic. As others have observed, few presidents of the United States would have ever claimed that they were not trying to find what might work, which is of course a mantra Obama invokes to explain himself. So like all other presidents, Obama tries to find what will work. Fine. Good for him.
Now, when he says that he is not ideological in his decision making, he really means it. He is not ideological in his decision making. However, this sets him apart from most of his predecessors.
Indeed, Obama's non-ideological approach to making decisions frustrates a lot of people, including me. Each decision seems to be ad hoc. But both Obama himself and Kloppenberg would defend the ad hoc approach by characterizing it as pragmatic.
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