Sometimes, I wonder why I so frequently see disparaging remarks in the press about the president’s disposition or mien. He’s aloof, arrogant, detached, above-it-all, distant, dismissive. The thing is, he doesn’t strike me as any of those things. Maybe every once in a while I get a brief hint that he’s impatient or frustrated with the stupidity that surrounds him. But, to me, it seems like he hides it well. Watch him console grieving parents or enter into a little child’s world or work a rope line, and he’s compassionate, intimate, wholly-there.
The problem seems to be that he keeps his guard up around reporters. And reporters do the reporting on the president’s personality. Consider the observation that Robert Draper made while visiting the new Bush library with Maureen Dowd:
Robert Draper, the author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush,” perused the library with me and observed: “So 43 grew up entitled but could display a commoner’s touch, while 44 grew up hardscrabble yet developed this imperial mien. The former is defined by incuriosity, the latter by self-absorption. One is a late-blooming artist, the other a precocious writer. They can each make you kind of miss the other.”
In other words, there is something about Barack Obama that Robert Draper simply doesn’t like. Maureen Dowd obviously feels the same way. He has an “imperial mien.” In their mouths, descriptions like “precocious” and [using a] “lapidary logic” sound like insults. They hate the smart kid. Obama projects a sense of superiority to these reporters. He makes them feel small and excluded and less than. And they resent him for it.
But the same things that these reporters dislike are what draw me to the president. Incisiveness, reason, cool-headedness, dispassion, intelligence, compassion, strategic thinking, an eye on the long game.
How often have we seen someone in a crowd shout out “we love you” at the president and watched him say “I love you back”? The stuck-in-the-24/7-news-cycle Beltway press has no feel for a man who lives as much in the future and the past as he does in the present. What I see as thoughtfulness, they see as dismissiveness. They scream “we don’t like you,” and he intimates “right back atcha.”
The day-to-day clutter of manufactured controversy and faux-scandal is ultimately unimportant to the president. What does he care of critics who want to know why gay rights have not yet been addressed, when he knows he will have laid down the most progress in history on that front by the end of his first term? He’s working from a vision. When a Code Pink protester rails against him for the situation as it stands, he can afford to be magnanimous because he’s in the process of laying out where we’re going.
This is what the press sees as being detached and above-it-all. But, in the context of effective governance, those attributes are virtues. How could he not feel at least some disdain for those who are so absorbed in the now that they can do nothing but quibble and nitpick, attacking him with a million pinpricks while never sensing that his vision is too big to be stymied by such trivialities?
Of course, he pays a price for being unloved by the press. He pays a price for not tending to the narrative of the day with the same intensity with which he tends to the long game. But he’s only one man and he can’t have every skill that one might want. If you want someone to arouse populist passions, you probably don’t pick the guy who excels at keeping everyone calm in a crisis. And if you could look at all the thronging crowds at all those Obama rallies and still argue that the man lacks warmth or is detached or can’t arouse populist passions, then maybe your standards are too high.
Or, maybe, you have just enough depth to realize that the president thinks you’re shallow. And you know that he is right. And you hate him for it.