From the LA Times review of David Remnick's new Obama biography:
"The Bridge" is a towering monument to Obama's hyper-professionalism when it comes to the art of politics. The president is an unflappable Zen master with a belly full of audacity. Hard work, endurance and civility are inherent in his personality. His greatest strength is that the opposition always underestimates him. In "Alice in Wonderland" terms, he's the Cheshire Cat, the magical creature who saves the day just as the guillotine is about to drop.
Witness how, earlier this month, Obama managed to pass the most sweeping change to America's healthcare system since the creation of Medicare in 1965. Many pundits thought Obamacare, as Republicans called it, was roadkill. When Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in January, even more conservatives heard the death knell. But by dodging lions and leapfrogging potholes (plus a little Chicago-style arm-twisting), Obama, bruised and battered, pulled out a New Deal-like victory.
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Anybody who tries to pigeonhole Obama is bound to get frustrated. Remnick, who has previously written a fine biography of Muhammad Ali, navigates all of Obama's creative rope-a-dope tactics when confronted with racial prejudice, old-style jealousy and new-style (post-Great Society) urban politics.
Although operating from left-center, Obama is a consummate result-oriented pragmatist who early in life developed an earnest, open-minded consensus-seeking style. A one-man polyglot, he shuttled among Hawaii, Kansas, Kenya, Indonesia, Los Angeles and New York. He hated making enemies. His smile was radiant. He frowned on triumphalism. Nobody could ever accurately satirize him as an angry black man. Rage has been exorcised from his demeanor. Although blessed with a wry, mocking wit, Obama enjoys helping foes find their better nature.
"Barack is the interpreter," his friend Cassandra Butts says. "To be a good interpreter means you need fluency in two languages as well as cultural fluency on both sides. As a biracial person, he has had to come to an understanding of the two worlds he's lived in. . . . Living in those worlds, he functions as an interpreter to others."
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There are love stories revealed in "The Bridge," but none greater than his wise courting of Michelle Robinson. There are vivid details about how Obama won Illinois' 13th District in 1996 to become a state senator, and how he lost a 2000 bid for the U.S. House of Representatives to Bobby Rush. A chapter on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright imbroglio -- complete with the roles played by Rolling Stone, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West -- is riveting. There are clownish appearances by Alan Keyes and Louis Farrakhan; the Rev. Jesse Jackson doesn't fare well. Remnick interviewed a telephone book's worth of notable figures in Obama's life; they're all roll-called in the back pages. Someday they'll form the nucleus of a marvelous Obama Presidential Library oral history collection (if they were taped).
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When Obama gets carried along by the flux of his own ideas, it's crystal clear that he feels only tangentially connected to the black power movement of the 1960s. Like Albert Murray in his seminal book "The Omni-Americans," the president finds black people as American as Valley Forge -- after all, they've been here since the beginning. King has a national holiday. Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize, and now he is aiming for Mt. Rushmore -- for a spot right beside the four presidents he so admires.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/28/entertainment/la-ca-barack-obama28-2010mar28/4
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