I wasn't that impressed by Barack Obama's speech in Berlin. It felt a little forced and the comparisons that it so obviously and self-consciously invited with JFK and Reagan only served to diminish Mr Obama. When Kennedy and Reagan spoke in Berlin, they were both raising the stakes in an ideological struggle with totalitarianism. Mr Obama, by contrast, was delivering a honeyed message calculated to offend the fewest possible critics.

But, hey, the guy's got an election to win. By the time that JFK and Reagan were doing their thing, both had made it to the White House. So a little pandering can be forgiven. And what matters more is that Mr Obama has restored the primacy of oratory to political campaigning. Whatever one thinks of Berlin, a host of other Obama speeches will linger in the collective memory for as long as any candidate's.

Last week I confessed that we Brit politicians now communicate in a manner at once both hectoring and evasive - a remarkably irritating double. By contrast, Mr Obama has almost single-handedly resurrected the importance of proper speech-making.

By that I mean not just rhetorical stylishness (the deployment of alliteration and three-part lists, the soaring pulpit repetition of “yes we can”) but intellectual seriousness. A rather brilliant piece in New York magazine by Sam Anderson, about Mr Obama's rhetoric, makes the point that the Senator writes most of his own speeches, something no president has done effectively since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. Anderson quotes a book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, by Elvin T. Lim, which makes clear that the divorce between leadership and authorship has had a malign effect on politics. A hundred years ago presidential speeches were pitched at the reading level of college students. Now, they are delivered at the reading level of 13-year-olds.

By delivering speeches several thousand words long, densely argued and historically referenced, Mr Obama is consciously asking more of his audience. It creates a political vulnerability, making it easier to dismiss him as a liberal elitist out of touch with the good ol' boys who decide the crucial swing states. But it also creates a political possibility - that the presidential election may be decided on the basis of intellectual arguments between two men of impeccable character.

Not-so-beautiful minds

Of course, intellectual ability and writing genius are no guarantee of good character, let alone indications that an individual can navigate ethical shallows. History is littered with examples of fine minds corrupted by their engagement with brute power. Mark Lilla's book The Reckless Mind discusses how intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger placed their formidable intellects at the service of fascism. John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses charts how so many academics and writers saw in totalitarian politics a way to emphasise just how fine their minds were compared with others. This week, after Radovan Karadzic's arrest, I read of how another writer's infatuation with authoritarian politics ended in cheerleading for genocide. Alice Kaplan's The Collaborator is a biography of Robert Brasillach, a promising novelist and columnist who enthusiastically aligned himself with Nazism in occupied France. It's compellingly chilling.

Martin Heidegger's lover Hannah Arendt coined the memorable phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the clerical fastidiousness with which Adolf Eichmann dispatched his duties during the Holocaust. Acts of unimaginable cruelty were managed like exercises in local government accountancy. But what is more striking about evil is that it seduces the brilliant.

Clearly something appeals to intellectual vanity in a politics that elevates a vanguard over others and exempts them from the moral codes that bind others. Karadzic, a poet and psychiatrist, thought himself an intellectual, as did Mohammad Atta, the postgraduate and architect of 9/11. The argument has been running strongly of late that the answer to terrorism is economic reform to make the world fairer - and it's a powerful cry. But just as important is to make the case for democracy, in all its raucous messiness, against those who think their superior intellects permit them to cleanse our world of imperfections.

Well played

Talking of collaboration with evil, a new play discusses the delicate question of the composerRichard Strauss's relationship with the Third Reich. Strauss, like the conductors Furtwangler and von Karajan, was deployed to lend cultural lustre to fascism. The extent to which this can be understood, even forgiven, is the theme of the latest from Ronald Harwood.

Harwood's own genius has been put unambiguously at the service of decency and humanity, not least as the screenwriter of The Pianist and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. No disrespect to Harold Pinter, but why is he knighted, and Harwood just appointed CBE?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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