The author asks, "Had Bush heard of Thucydides?" I'm going to take a wild guess here and say, "No."

Bush: "I had Thucydides in college. They're easily treated."

If Richard Danzig turns out to be Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration, we will have a Cabinet member who has very likely read Thucydides, as a freshman at Reed.

You want to tie academics to the Obama campaign with a Portland reference thrown in? Check this out: Both my sister and brother-in-law taught a student in high school named Lisa Hay who got beat out for President of the Harvard Law Review by Barack Obama. It’s a convoluted story after that but she was involved in bringing Barack to the attention of Jack Corrigan who was Kerry’s convention manager and that is supposedly one reason Obama made it to keynote speaker in 2004, the speech that launched him as a national figure.
According to the National Journal there was “a chance conversation with Lisa Hay, a U.S. public defender in Portland, Ore., who had worked for Corrigan in the Dukakis campaign and was attending a legal conference in Boston. When the two grabbed a cup of coffee, Corrigan pressed Hay to help out the Kerry campaign: "I said, 'Will you give him some money and do some work?' And she says, 'I'd rather give money to my friend Barack.'….. Hay's account(of a Barack speech) made a lasting impression on Corrigan. "I just thought there would be a lot of people [in the convention hall] who would identify with his story," Corrigan says. "That's when I put him on the list for keynote."’

Now I don’t know how my relatives are playing it. Maybe if they had been better teaches Lisa would have beaten Barack at Harvard, so it was their ineptness that made it happen. That’s the humble route. I see it like this though: If they weren’t great teachers Lisa wouldn’t have gone onto Harvard law School and wouldn’t have been ready later to help make history. At any rate, none of this occurs without my family’s deep personal involvement. That’s our story anyway.

If you want to read some even more accessible history that sheds abundant light on the world of today, read Walter Karp's fantastic book "The Politics of War" about the era 1890-1920. It was one of the best histories I've ever read -- I kept wanting to read it slowly just to savor it.