November 10, 2010
AS THE ONE IS DESERVEDLY CONFIDENT SO THE OTHER HAS EARNED HIS SELF DOUBT:
The Decider vs. The Agonizer (Howard Kurtz, 11/09/10, Daily Beast)
The president shook his head.“Look, I’m not going to debate the issue,” he said. He had already decided.
Waterboarding was legal. Why? “Because the lawyers said it was legal,” George W. Bush told Matt Lauer.
But what if an American was taken captive in a foreign country? Bush cut Lauer off: “All I ask is that people read the book.” Case closed.
Twenty-five hours earlier, Bush’s successor was seen fielding this question: Had he lost his mojo?
“I think it’s--I think it’s a fair argument, you know, I--I think that over the course of two years, we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that, you know, leadership isn’t just legislation, that it’s a matter of persuading people,” Barack Obama told Steve Kroft.
The contrast could hardly have been sharper. Bush, with his short, declarative sentences, so sure of himself he felt no need to probe further on one of the most divisive ethical issues of his tenure. Obama, with his finely rendered prose, meandering around as he inspects the subject from various angles, almost like a think-tank analyst.
