Is the most important presidential quality now appearing "comfortable in their own skin?"* as we are so often told Obama is and Romney clearly isn't (I wouldn't say he looks uncomfortable, more stilted).
Perhaps not in an older time, but in the age of video and web coverage, it certainly seems so. Or at least pundits keep incessantly mentioning it.
In Bill Simmons pod-cast with Jimmy Kimmel, reminiscing about their encounter with the President, both men remark about how "there is just something about [Obama] when you meet him -- he's just cool." They then compare this quality to Bill Clinton, a famed extrovert fueled by interpersonal connection.
Lost in this discussion, however, is the fact that, despite his reputation as a dim-witted bumbler, there is a reason George W. Bush defeated Gore despite the remarkable economic run of the Clinton years: he was a remarkably interpersonally gifted politician in his time as well.
His limited vocabulary and elocution skills were part of his routine rather than a flaw. I would bet that stumbling in dry policy discourse was endearing to more voters in Ohio and Florida rather than repellant. Indeed, he consistently dominated the poll question: Would you want to have a beer with this candidate? (despite his privileged East-Coast background undermining his Texas persona). Indeed, in the debates of 2000 and 2004, where Gore sounded like conceited and Kerry dry and robotic, Bush always came across as friendly and well-meaning.
I know someone who met W. briefly, as Presidents are required to host myriad visting groups every year. He reported that he completely dominated the fairly inconsequential room socially, cracking jokes and slyly playing up his stupid persona. He had a definite swagger of the kind documented obsessively by the PUA community, only it was natural. He leaned back.
Which brings us to Obama and his reported swagger.
Sailer and others, even the New York Times, have well-documented how the President is in some ways more Coolidge than Clinton: naturally introverted.
Numerous sources report he is not one to work a room or reach out to constituents, and until recently preferred to the lone smoke-break to just about anything.
Sailer has speculated that he has mild manic-depressive cycle. More tellingly, I think, is his documentation of the changes in Obama's oratory style, as he increasingly embraced a black identity as his political career progressed.
One possibility: Obama is an introvert who studied the behaviors of natural leaders and learned to fake it, able now to conjure up the effortless personal cool needed in video-interviews, but, crucially, someone who still retreats back into his introverted self for energy recharges.
Who then is the real Obama -- is he gifted/cursed with the irrational self-confidence of a "natural leader." Or is it all a charade -- the supposed over-competitiveness not a manifestation of his Michael Jordan like testosterone-fueled drive, but really a ploy to mask a suppressed cerebralism, even self-doubt one might expect from the author of Dreams from My Father. Or was that all an act for his intelligentsia audience, obscuring a man who has sought ever more power every step of the way?
Perhaps we won't know until his inevitable record-breaking memoir gives us yet more opaque material to sift through.
Consider, however, how this question influences his thinking on the Iran-Israel question. Where W. Bush would likely have an unshakeable trust in his gut instinct, I am not sure how Obama approaches the question. Or Romney for that matter, whose thinking and motivation for seeking power is similar;y a mystery.
Unfortunately, I feel Obama's record implies he will just do whatever his Kennedy School trained advisors tell him to do, for which reason we should all be afraid. Indeed, he has shown little interest that I can see in deviating from the liberal ivy league consensus -- pace his revival of Laurence Summers -- with disastrous consequences for our economy.
You never know, though: sometimes Presidents are forced to define themselves at crucial moments no one sees coming when we truly get to see the cut of their jib.
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*I remember reading a David Foster Wallace essay, supposedly on the strangeness of this phrase, that in reality communicated the strange, miserable existence of Wallace himself, who seemed to me the polar opposite of a Clinton or W. Bush. It was as if the author could not imagine holding a calm large-group social interaction or mild performance without being beset by crippling self-consciousness (indeed he saw such calm as abnormal, if I recall). Perhaps his annoying footnoting habit resulted from this crippling self-consciousness -- that is, it is a product of his need to constantly clarify or modify his attempts at communicating with the outside world. I never read any of his fiction, but I of this essay immediately when revelations of his long-term depression came to light following his suicide.
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