Medium Cool or How Barack Obama's Demeanor Will Help Him Run Against a Frantic GOP Field

[flpoljunkie]

Medium Cool

One rap on Obama is that he’s too aloof and cerebral, that he just can’t “connect.” There’s truth in that observation—but don’t discount the ability of the G.O.P. presidential contenders to make him look like a regular guy.

By Todd S. Purdum


BY JULIE DENESHA/GETTY IMAGES.

The list of President Obama’s potential problems in getting re-elected is almost too long to enumerate: job-approval ratings that hover in the low 40s, a stubbornly stagnant economy, a dysfunctional political culture in Washington that his election was supposed to have changed, and a personality so even-keeled as to make him sometimes seem dead in the roiling waters around him.

But as the Not-Ready-for-Primary-Time Players of the Republican field continue their pre-Iowa and New Hampshire follies, it is worth pausing to ponder another reality. Every incumbent president has enormous built-in political advantages—from the power to make news with his every word to the ability to offer rides on Air Force One to politicians who matter—and this particular president is possessed of a temperament, and a track record, ideally suited to the clutch play.

When Time magazine, citing Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim “How can a president not be an actor?,” recently asked George Clooney how good an actor Obama is, Clooney replied, “If you consider a good actor to be the guy that you want when you’ve got one take left and the sun is setting, then he’s a very good actor, because when his back’s against the wall, he’s always terrific.”

Obama is also something else. As his half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, told me in Hawaii nearly five years ago when I set out to explore his early years, “he’s a very cool customer.” As often as not in the White House, this quality has worked against him, when he’s been seen as inadequately responsive to the plight of a voter in a town-hall meeting, or not enraged enough about the Gulf oil spill or the jobless economic recovery. It has become perhaps the most encrusted trope of political journalism inside the Beltway and out that Obama’s lack of a Clintonesque ability to feel our pain is his signal political flaw. As with all clichés, there is truth in the critique—and Obama doesn’t help himself when he plows his way through parties of his supporters and friends—as I have seen him do—by clasping hands and saying in the same breath, “Gotta go!” People like to feel the guy they like can spend a few moments to like them back from time to time.

But it is also an incontrovertible truth that Obama got where he is—as a mixed-race man who prevailed in a white-majority world; as a dogged second-stringer who won a slot on his varsity basketball team; as a Delphic conciliator who became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and eventually, of the United States—by virtue of this very sangfroid. They may not put it that way in Peoria, but in Marshall McLuhan’s media terms, Obama’s as cool as they come.

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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/purdum/2011/12/barack-obama-201112

[elleng]

1. I hate this 'aloof and cerebral' meme.

He's CIVIL, smart, measured, and well-spoken, he won't be running against a 'frantic field,' but against one of them, and he'll address that repug appropriately. Newt will throw red-meat to his 'followers,' and POTUS will address issues substantively.

[Cigar11]

2. People like Newt and Governor Christy are just loud talking Fat-Azz Blowhards. All Bark – No Bite!