This is true: After Barack Obama's inauguration last Tuesday, I heard a TV reporter noting, when the new president signed some documents, that he has excellent penmanship.

Yes, the adoration is over the top. For a guy to be complimented on his penmanship is in the same category as praise for the creases he irons in his jeans or for using "lie" and "lay" correctly. In other words, many guys would sneer at another fellow whose penmanship was praiseworthy.

Yet Obama's adoring electorate doesn't seem to be sneering. If you thought Ronald Reagan was the Teflon president, just you wait. Obama is, for now, so popular as to withstand even penmanship praise and be none the less revered. (His actual signature, though, would not pass muster with my third-grade teacher.) And for the record, Obama used "lie" and "lay" correctly in his inaugural address and doesn't seem to have slipped in the polls.

This offers a huge opportunity.

Obama's election has taught the country much about race and background. Among the many lessons: Race is not always a deal-breaking negative. Millions of white people will, after all, vote for a black man for president. Growing up with a single mom doesn't doom you to poverty.

Obama broke many barriers on his way to the Oval Office, so maybe he can break one more: the traditional American disdain for guys who use complex syntax and good grammar and admit to reading poetry — guys who act smart.

Since the 1960s, Republicans and conservatives have clubbed Democrats and liberals for being elitist, snobby, out-of-touch sissified wimps. They all but accused liberals of having excellent penmanship. George W. Bush with his "nuc-u-lar" versus John Kerry's foghorn-like oratory was a classic matchup. Although the impetus was politics, the success of those attacks proved there was something underlying U.S. society that wasn't so much political as cultural: For many, many Americans, being intellectual was not admirable.

From what I observe, the smart-guys-are-wusses attitude hits men and boys especially hard. I don't think it's coincidence that boys' test scores start to drop right as they hit middle school, when peer pressure sharply intensifies. I don't think it's coincidence that you hear black teens equate good grades with "acting white," or hear kids (from all ethnic backgrounds) in the rigorous International Baccalaureate curriculum joke about how nerdy and geeky they are.

Quips about penmanship aside, the idea that intellectual achievement is for wimps and nerds and other socially unpopular sorts is one of the brick walls blocking better American educational achievement. Why would any insecure 14-year-old boy (and at 14, virtually all kids are insecure) want to risk his peers thinking he's a sissified wimp because he likes to read or enjoys physics?

If anti-education peer pressure is strong even among middle-class kids, what must it be like in neighborhoods even more cut off from what we think of as mainstream American values — neighborhoods where college degrees must seem almost as mythical as unicorns, where substance abuse imprisons too many and actual prison imprisons too many others, neighborhoods where jobs have vanished and too many adults have given up finding work that will support a household?

It's unrealistic to expect most kids from those backgrounds to withstand not only the lure of the street corner but to withstand peer pressure at school — and at home — to avoid acting smart. Yes, some lucky and extraordinary kids from bad neighborhoods or deeply flawed families summon the resilience to find their way out and into a better life. Too many don't.

But for today, all over America young people — black and white — know Barack Obama is very cool. Maybe, just maybe, he is even so cool that young American males (females, too) can now decide that if Obama can use big words such as "recriminations" and "undiminished" in his speech, then it's OK to have a good vocabulary and even good penmanship. That good grades are OK. And that to act smart doesn't make you a nerd. It makes you more like Barack.

Mary Newsom is an associate editor at the Charlotte (N.C.)Observer.