President Obama’s Introverted Equilibrium Probably Tripped Him Up, when He Failed to Recognize the Importance of Job Creation for Mid-Term Election Success

© 2010 Peter Free

 

19 October 2010

 

A President’s character plays a significant role in success and failures

 

Contrast Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

 

Would Bill Clinton have missed the fact that average Americans care more about jobs than anything else?  Would he have needed a poll to tell him?

 

Democrats are in trouble because they have not been nearly aggressive enough in confronting this profound economic crisis facing so many millions of ordinary Americans.

 

© 2010 Bob Herbert, That Sinking Feeling, New York Times (18 October 2010)

 

Ordinariness was Bill Clinton’s talent.  He knew and apparently cared what regular people were thinking and feeling.

 

Most ordinary folk have the sense that President Obama does not.

 

The character component ─ the big picture backwards

 

President Obama is regularly credited with seeing the big picture.

 

The President’s “big” ─ as in governmental largesse ─ focused too much on supporting plutocrats (and their institutions) and too little on the common people.

 

For those of us who comprise the American rabble, when the economic bullet is zipping toward our heads, short-term ducking looks like the best long-term solution.

 

Saving essentially corrupt and unregulated banks, so that they get even richer and more difficult to control, increasingly seemed an undesirable American solution.  Even in the long term.

 

A little more visible help directed toward the People, from the Prez, would have made us all feel better.

 

Character, introversion, and out-of-touch-ness

 

So why has the President been so seemingly out-of-touch with what matters most to the non-elite?

 

Obama comes across as an introvert, someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. . . . Unlike Clinton, who never met a rope line he did not want to work, Obama does not relish glad-handing.

 

While Clinton made late-night phone calls around Washington to vent or seek advice, Obama rarely reaches outside the tight group of advisers like Emanuel, Axelrod, Rouse, Messina, Plouffe, Gibbs and Jarrett, as well as a handful of personal friends. “He’s opaque even to us,” an aide told me.

 

© 2010 Peter Baker, Education of a President, New York Times (12 October 2010)

 

Polls can’t substitute for heart or a genuine sense of noblesse oblige

 

If ya ain’t really one of the people, you will have trouble connecting with what moves them.

 

Connecting can come from heart or from a sense of noblesse oblige.  It can even occasionally be faked.  President Obama appears to lack a developed sense of all three.

 

Perhaps the President will eventually come to temper his fascination with being one of the elite with exerting a sense of responsibility toward America’s true core.

 

That is admittedly a difficult mix.  And I don’t mean to single President Obama out.  Few presidents have met that challenge.  Barack Obama gets flayed because he so obviously thought he would be one of the greats.

 

That feeling of destiny apparently led him to bite off too much.  And in the wrong directions.  Many of us thought so, even when he took office.

 

Why didn’t he see it?  Hubris?

 

What should the President do now?

 

Sometimes the big picture is best served with concrete advances in the short-term, served up in a casserole of simultaneous teachings about what needs to be done in the long-term.