THE BANALITY OF BARRY:

Only Connect!: How Obama's cool, detached temperament is hurting him and his party. (Jacob Weisberg, Jan. 23, 2010, Slate)

The way Obama connects to people is the opposite of a Clinton, a Bush, or a Ronald Reagan. Those presidents were all relaters. They bonded with people based on common feelings, experiences, and interests. Reagan did this best through the medium of television. Bush did it best in person and not so well through television. Clinton could do it blindfolded and hanging upside down. But for all three, connecting emotionally was part and parcel of their political skill. As a result, people tended to love them or hate them, sometimes in succession, but without much neutral ground in between.

Obama's coolness and detachment put him in a different category of president that includes Lincoln (on the positive side) and Jimmy Carter (on the negative). His relationship with the world is primarily rational and analytical rather than intuitive or emotional. As he acknowledged in his interview with George Stephanopoulos the day after Scott Brown's victory, his tendency to focus on substance can make him seem remote and technocratic. So while many people continue to deeply admire him, few come away from any encounter feeling closer to him. He is not warm, he is not loyal, he is not deeply involved with others. His most fervent enthusiasts tend to express love for the ideas he embodies and represents—America transcending its racial history, a fairer and more unified society, rationality, wise decision-making, and so forth—as opposed to for the man himself.

This sense of separateness from other people, organizations, and causes runs through Obama's biography. In Chicago politics, one learns to quickly place people in relation to the city's big narrative. There was the old ethnic and ward-based Daley machine. There were the reform liberals (including my parents and their friends in the 1970s) who challenged it. There was the Harold Washington movement, which brought blacks into the political mainstream and finally killed off the machine. Since 1989, the second Mayor Daley has presided over a synthesis of these elements. If you know this story well, it's not hard to locate anyone from Chicago—such as David Axelrod or Rahm Emanuel—in relation to it. The funny thing about Obama is that although he arrived in Chicago in 1985 and started his career there, he somehow never joined in. He participated in politics while keeping a feathery distance.

This curious sense of remove characterizes Obama's relationship with every institution he's been part of—the Punahou School in Honolulu, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, the Illinois state Senate, and finally the U.S. Senate.

People have to cling to the possibility that he has hidden depths because the alternative is so appalling.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2010 7:15 PM