Self-containment is not simply Obama’s political default mode. Self-possession is the core of his being, and a central part of the secret of his success. It is Obama’s unwavering discipline to keep his cool when others are losing theirs, and it seems likely that no black man who behaved otherwise could ever have won the presidency.
But this quality, perhaps Obama’s greatest strength in gaining office, is his greatest weakness in conducting it. And as he ends the first year of his second term, that weakness seems to dog him—and to matter—more and more. At a time when the abrasions of office leave any president most in need of friends, Obama is the capital’s Lonely Guy.
O bama’s self-evident isolation has another effect: It tends to insulate him from engagement in the management of his own administration. The latest round of “what did the president know and when did he know it” on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone raised troubling questions: Were Obama’s aides too afraid to tell him? Was he too detached to ask? Or both? At the least, such glaring failures cast fresh doubt on Obama’s invariable assurance to those around him in times of trouble: “I got this.”
It is impossible to know whether Obama’s go-it-alone approach is instinctual or learned, but he comes by it honestly—and painfully. From a far earlier age and to a far greater degree than is generally understood, Obama has always been alone. He was abandoned not only by his black African father, whom he later met just once at age 10, but also by his white American mother, who left him as a teenager with her parents in Hawaii to pursue graduate fieldwork in anthropology in Indonesia. At an age when most adolescents are grappling with how to break away from their families, Obama’s had crumbled away from him.
“Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he would write in Dreams from My Father. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know what that meant.”
Give Obama credit for figuring that out, and for rising beyond even the wildest imaginings of his self-reliant youth. If he had chosen to be a novelist or neurosurgeon, an airline pilot or an atomic engineer, the very qualities of self-sufficiency that even some of his strongest supporters find so frustrating would be an unalloyed asset. But in a politician—above all, in a president—such qualities are confounding and, at times, crippling.
“He never needed anyone to affirm his value,” one of his longest-serving advisers told me, “and for that reason, I’m not sure he understands what it would mean to provide a little affirmation to another politician. Because it wouldn’t mean much to him.”
Obama is far from the first president—or the first suddenly world-famous figure—to keep his own counsel or to rely on the tightest possible circle of longtime advisers and old, close friends. More than 20 years ago, when Mario Cuomo was seen as the Democratic Party’s best hope for taking the White House, one knowledgeable New Yorker assured me that Cuomo would never run, because he could never bring himself to trust the number of people required to undertake an effective campaign. In February 2007, the week Obama declared his candidacy, his confidante Valerie Jarrett told me that she had warned him at a backyard barbecue in Chicago the previous fall, when his book tour for The Audacity of Hope was morphing into a presidential campaign, “You’ll never make any new friends.” Obama has since worked overtime to prove the prescience of Jarrett’s view.
Nor is Obama the first president to disdain the circular, self-important, too-easily-distracted-from-what really-counts culture of the nation’s capital. In his new biography of Woodrow Wilson, A. Scott Berg notes that Wilson told his second press conference after taking office in March 1913, “The only way I can succeed is by not having my mind live in Washington. My body has got to live there, but my mind has got to live in the United States, or else I will fail.” But Wilson did use his physical presence in Washington to work his will, becoming the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person, and doing so repeatedly—and persuasively, at least in the early part of his tenure. He held some 60 press conferences during his first eight months in office.
The structural partisan realities of modern American politics are such that no one believes that Obama could really do himself any good by inviting John Boehner to share even a magnum of his favorite Merlot, if only because the recent government shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis showed that Boehner can barely control his own hotheaded Republican caucus, much less strike a binding bipartisan deal with the White House. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that Obama did not do himself at least some real harm in September by abruptly canceling the annual congressional picnic at the White House—which had already been postponed from June—on the grounds that members would be too busy considering the president’s request for authority to use force in Syria. The rain check was delivered in a terse, graceless, 53-word e-mail to Capitol Hill offices, announcing that “[t]he President and Mrs. Obama look forward to welcoming Members of Congress and their immediate families at the Congressional Holiday Ball in December.” Immediate families. Such a friendly, legalistic ring.
No one in Washington is afraid of Obama. The Senate’s newest Democrat, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, voted “present” on the Foreign Relations Committee’s resolution endorsing the use of force in Syria, more concerned about being out-of-step with his liberal home-state colleague Elizabeth Warren than about offending the commander in chief. Liberal Senate Democrats leapt at the pain-free chance to block Larry Summers, Obama’s first choice to head the Federal Reserve, and even a moderate like Jon Tester of Montana, whose vote Obama might well have won, let it be known that no one from the administration had so much as been in touch with him until two days before Summers withdrew his name from consideration—when Tester tersely informed the White House that he would vote no.
Indeed, however he treats his enemies, Obama could work harder to get by with a little help from his friends. Throughout his tenure, he has generally refused to adopt the practice of every president since at least Gerald Ford by posing for pictures with his guests at the more than a dozen White House holiday parties (except in the case of the receptions for Congress and the White House press corps, who could be counted on to make a real fuss).
In 2009, in Obama’s first year in office, my wife and I found ourselves trapped in the Blue Room, next to one of the president’s most important early boosters and major fund-raisers, when Obama’s disembodied amplified voice suddenly rang out and the crowd rushed through a doorway to the mansion’s entry hall, blocking our view. The president had paused with his wife, Michelle, on the bottom steps of the Grand Staircase behind a velvet rope to make brief remarks and shake the few hands that could reach him, before retreating back upstairs. “Can you see him?” the graybeard asked as we craned our necks over the crowd. The answer was no.
In late September, Obama attended a “dinner” fund-raiser for high donors to the Democratic National Committee at the super-luxe Jefferson Hotel a few blocks from the White House. Each of the two dozen-odd guests had contributed $32,400, the maximum allowed by law. The president’s motorcade left the White House for the hotel at 4:19 p.m. and was back at the White House by 5:25. The price of the encounter: about $540 per donor for each minute of the president’s time—at an hour when the only other people eating dinner in Washington were doing so in nursing homes. How much fun could that be—for anyone?
But this quality, perhaps Obama’s greatest strength in gaining office, is his greatest weakness in conducting it. And as he ends the first year of his second term, that weakness seems to dog him—and to matter—more and more. At a time when the abrasions of office leave any president most in need of friends, Obama is the capital’s Lonely Guy.
O bama’s self-evident isolation has another effect: It tends to insulate him from engagement in the management of his own administration. The latest round of “what did the president know and when did he know it” on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone raised troubling questions: Were Obama’s aides too afraid to tell him? Was he too detached to ask? Or both? At the least, such glaring failures cast fresh doubt on Obama’s invariable assurance to those around him in times of trouble: “I got this.”
It is impossible to know whether Obama’s go-it-alone approach is instinctual or learned, but he comes by it honestly—and painfully. From a far earlier age and to a far greater degree than is generally understood, Obama has always been alone. He was abandoned not only by his black African father, whom he later met just once at age 10, but also by his white American mother, who left him as a teenager with her parents in Hawaii to pursue graduate fieldwork in anthropology in Indonesia. At an age when most adolescents are grappling with how to break away from their families, Obama’s had crumbled away from him.
“Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he would write in Dreams from My Father. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know what that meant.”
Give Obama credit for figuring that out, and for rising beyond even the wildest imaginings of his self-reliant youth. If he had chosen to be a novelist or neurosurgeon, an airline pilot or an atomic engineer, the very qualities of self-sufficiency that even some of his strongest supporters find so frustrating would be an unalloyed asset. But in a politician—above all, in a president—such qualities are confounding and, at times, crippling.
“He never needed anyone to affirm his value,” one of his longest-serving advisers told me, “and for that reason, I’m not sure he understands what it would mean to provide a little affirmation to another politician. Because it wouldn’t mean much to him.”
Obama is far from the first president—or the first suddenly world-famous figure—to keep his own counsel or to rely on the tightest possible circle of longtime advisers and old, close friends. More than 20 years ago, when Mario Cuomo was seen as the Democratic Party’s best hope for taking the White House, one knowledgeable New Yorker assured me that Cuomo would never run, because he could never bring himself to trust the number of people required to undertake an effective campaign. In February 2007, the week Obama declared his candidacy, his confidante Valerie Jarrett told me that she had warned him at a backyard barbecue in Chicago the previous fall, when his book tour for The Audacity of Hope was morphing into a presidential campaign, “You’ll never make any new friends.” Obama has since worked overtime to prove the prescience of Jarrett’s view.
Nor is Obama the first president to disdain the circular, self-important, too-easily-distracted-from-what really-counts culture of the nation’s capital. In his new biography of Woodrow Wilson, A. Scott Berg notes that Wilson told his second press conference after taking office in March 1913, “The only way I can succeed is by not having my mind live in Washington. My body has got to live there, but my mind has got to live in the United States, or else I will fail.” But Wilson did use his physical presence in Washington to work his will, becoming the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person, and doing so repeatedly—and persuasively, at least in the early part of his tenure. He held some 60 press conferences during his first eight months in office.
The structural partisan realities of modern American politics are such that no one believes that Obama could really do himself any good by inviting John Boehner to share even a magnum of his favorite Merlot, if only because the recent government shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis showed that Boehner can barely control his own hotheaded Republican caucus, much less strike a binding bipartisan deal with the White House. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that Obama did not do himself at least some real harm in September by abruptly canceling the annual congressional picnic at the White House—which had already been postponed from June—on the grounds that members would be too busy considering the president’s request for authority to use force in Syria. The rain check was delivered in a terse, graceless, 53-word e-mail to Capitol Hill offices, announcing that “[t]he President and Mrs. Obama look forward to welcoming Members of Congress and their immediate families at the Congressional Holiday Ball in December.” Immediate families. Such a friendly, legalistic ring.
No one in Washington is afraid of Obama. The Senate’s newest Democrat, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, voted “present” on the Foreign Relations Committee’s resolution endorsing the use of force in Syria, more concerned about being out-of-step with his liberal home-state colleague Elizabeth Warren than about offending the commander in chief. Liberal Senate Democrats leapt at the pain-free chance to block Larry Summers, Obama’s first choice to head the Federal Reserve, and even a moderate like Jon Tester of Montana, whose vote Obama might well have won, let it be known that no one from the administration had so much as been in touch with him until two days before Summers withdrew his name from consideration—when Tester tersely informed the White House that he would vote no.
Indeed, however he treats his enemies, Obama could work harder to get by with a little help from his friends. Throughout his tenure, he has generally refused to adopt the practice of every president since at least Gerald Ford by posing for pictures with his guests at the more than a dozen White House holiday parties (except in the case of the receptions for Congress and the White House press corps, who could be counted on to make a real fuss).
In 2009, in Obama’s first year in office, my wife and I found ourselves trapped in the Blue Room, next to one of the president’s most important early boosters and major fund-raisers, when Obama’s disembodied amplified voice suddenly rang out and the crowd rushed through a doorway to the mansion’s entry hall, blocking our view. The president had paused with his wife, Michelle, on the bottom steps of the Grand Staircase behind a velvet rope to make brief remarks and shake the few hands that could reach him, before retreating back upstairs. “Can you see him?” the graybeard asked as we craned our necks over the crowd. The answer was no.
In late September, Obama attended a “dinner” fund-raiser for high donors to the Democratic National Committee at the super-luxe Jefferson Hotel a few blocks from the White House. Each of the two dozen-odd guests had contributed $32,400, the maximum allowed by law. The president’s motorcade left the White House for the hotel at 4:19 p.m. and was back at the White House by 5:25. The price of the encounter: about $540 per donor for each minute of the president’s time—at an hour when the only other people eating dinner in Washington were doing so in nursing homes. How much fun could that be—for anyone?
