One Year: Dreams from Another Life
Posted by William Finnegan
Let me jump back farther than one year. Six years ago this spring, I was tooling around Illinois with Obama, reporting a Profile. He was a state senator gunning for the U.S. Senate, not yet famous. I watched him campaign, talked to his friends and enemies, tried to assess him and his chances. He and Michelle gave me a lot of time. At one point, after a long day in public, he said, “I’d rather be doing what you’re doing. Sitting in the corner listening, watching everybody, taking notes. That comes more naturally to me than this does.” I half believed him. His book, “Dreams from My Father,” was out of print then, but I’d read a used copy and had been blown away. The guy could write. He was also a born observer. His depiction of modern Kenya, in all its scruffy sadness, was pitch-perfect. If he lost this Senate run, or just got sick of politics, he probably could make a living as a writer of some kind.
Ha.
But watching Obama perform—or, on a bad day, function—in the million-watt glare of the Presidency, I sometimes think I see traces of an old ambivalence, a slight wistfulness even, about the insanely public life he chose. He’s no Hamlet. He doesn’t dither, or fetishize indecision. He loves to win. He wants to get things done. But he is guilty of being an intellectual, and he clearly prefers to believe his constituents are grownups, and that preference can put him in a bind. After the failed airliner bombing on Christmas, for instance, I seemed to hear and read a lot of complaints about his failure to address the nation—to comfort and reassure, to calm nerves. My own impression at the time was that nobody really needed comfort or reassurance, except the pundits who complained. Their argument was that, in a crisis, the President needs to be a father figure, not just a rational decision-maker. I don’t actually disagree with that. But who decides what’s a crisis? The press can whip one up out of not much. And political leaders can be compelled to respond, can be put on the defensive, no matter how contrived the issue. I don’t mean that the threat of terrorism is contrived, only that the country’s psyche is not as fragile or foolish as it’s often represented.
But Obama can’t afford to trust himself now, at least not always—can’t trust his own instincts about what the public can handle or understand. Too much is at stake. He wants to accomplish too much, both domestically and beyond. So I see him being subtly changed by these pressures of office, becoming less incisive and cool, getting broader, more conventional, more conservative. The days when he coveted anonymity, marginality, the privacy in which to make the original, idiosyncratic observation, must seem to him now like a dream from another life.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/01/finnegan-obama-anniversary.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
