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If asked to vote, I would have voted for Noam. Not for being an 'intellectual' in the sense of a person with advanced waffling skills but because he brought order to the formal treatment of grammar in computer science on top of all the other stuff he did. He's long been #2 on my list of 'best suited to be president', only surpassed by myself of course.
So this guy gets votes from both the artsy liberals and the presumably over represented science types. Of course he's going to win. When Umberto Eco can do the math like Noam can, he might be able to double his votes and come close to going from #2 to #1.