THE BELL CURVE:

I just looked up “elitism� in the dictionary. Since Barack Obama is being pounded as an elitist and I‘m being told by the Hillary campaign that I shouldn’t want such a person as president of the United States, I figured I should know what it meant before passing judgment. So here’s how Webster defines elitism: “A small group of people within a larger group who have more power, social standing, wealth or talent than the rest of the group.�

Elitism has a totally negative connotation in the United States where we subscribe to the ideal that “all men are created equal.�

Since Thomas Jefferson made no distinction between spiritual and human equality, we have been brought up to feel enormous guilt if we suggest — by intent or unknowingly — any sort of elitist posture.

This public attitude protects us from presumptuous fakes who claim the prerogatives of elitism. But it has also cost us the potential benefits from a lot of individuals — especially public servants — who have failed to realize even a measure of their possibilities or have conformed to codes irrelevant to their intelligence or imagination to avoid that guilt trip.

Obama’s recent campaign behavior in Indiana, for example, reflected this fear.

In an effort to cleanse himself from charges of elitism, he rather frenetically nurtured the good guy image by ditching his tie and jacket, mixing it up with construction workers, fondling cans of beer at bowling alleys and stressing his humble roots.

It apparently worked well enough to make the Indiana primary a cliffhanger. And it may have created a model of what we can expect between now and November — campaign behavior based on the assumption that any suggestion of elitism somehow plays out to the disadvantage of working-class Americans.

This is a kind of reverse snobbery. Far too seldom do we look at the other side of that coin, which says we need to recognize a high grade of intelligence as a powerful asset rather than a minor consideration — and sometimes even a deterrent — in the performance of public officials we elect.

Choosing to vote for a president of the United States because he or she mirrors our own limitations may be heart warming but is highly counter-productive in the great scheme of things.

No example in my lifetime illustrates this point better than Adlai Stevenson, who twice ran for president — in 1952 and 1956 — and twice lost to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who led the Allied forces to victory in Europe in World War II.

Although it would have been almost impossible to find a Democratic candidate who could have defeated Eisenhower, Stevenson had to fight the additional disadvantage of being perceived as an elitist.

But in between his two losing runs for the presidency, I saw Stevenson win over a hometown audience visibly hostile to Stevenson’s impressive intellect and as coldly unreceptive as any group he had ever faced.

Stevenson lived — and his three sons attended school — in the Chicago suburban town of Libertyville, in a county that hadn’t elected a Democrat to public office since the Civil War.

As Stevenson’s political star was rising — first as governor of Illinois, then as a presidential candidate — he became a downright embarrassment to his townfolk. The city council even refused to approve a banner announcing this was Stevenson’s home town.

So it was in this political climate that Libertyville faced the dedication ceremonies for a fine new high school — and the selection of a speaker to properly celebrate the occasion. While the ultra-conservative school board members were debating which Republican to invite, the lone closet Democrat on the board convinced his associates they would look foolish if they ignored Stevenson and should therefore offer him a cursory invitation which he would, of course, be too busy to accept. Then they could choose a proper Republican.

And so they did. And Stevenson, to their consternation, accepted.

The closet Democrat invited the school board members to tea at his house before the ceremonies, and I was there, at his invitation, as a writer for the Saturday Evening Post.

The atmosphere was strained, and only Stevenson’s effervescence kept things from disintegrating.

When we broke up to drive to the school, the board members, and probably most of the audience as well, were frightened over what Stevenson might use this platform to say.

I was sitting with his youngest son, Borden, who had heard his father speak on dozens of internationally important occasions, yet was clearly uneasy at the tension.

Stevenson’s introduction was brief and greeted by only perfunctory applause. He began by saying: “I shall talk with brief but tiresome solemnity� — and then began to speak, without notes, his mien serious, and his thesis — education — unadulterated by any hint of politics.

He had no reluctance to draw on his intellect to say such things as, “Totalitarianism snuffs out intellectual force. In ancient Greece, reckless jingoism was substituted for the word of that philosophic gadfly, Socrates.�

And when he finished his 20-minute talk, he said, almost wistfully, “I hope we get to know each other better.�

And so the connection was made. The strain was gone.

The loud applause that followed him up the aisle was genuine.

It occurs to me that Obama is also from Illinois, and also accused of being dangerously intelligent. It also occurs to me that I’m not going to reject Obama because of his perceived elitism. Instead, it will be a great relief to consider a potential president who — like Adlai Stevenson — can talk and think in complete sentences.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.