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Barack Obama — forever sizing up
Suspicious of generalizations
But defenders say that Mr. Obama’s reticence is as intellectual as it is tactical. He is a contextualist by nature, they say, suspicious of generalizations. He lived in enough places, at an early enough age, to realize that the same solutions do not work everywhere. Unlike his mother, an idealistic dreamer who moved to Indonesia without realizing a brutal coup had just taken place there, Mr. Obama seems more wary of venturing too far than not far enough. And his years teaching law — particularly chronicling the failure of broad, court-led efforts at social change — gave him a distrust of one-size-fits-all policies.
Countless times on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama has cited the forceful speech he delivered in 2002 against the impending Iraq invasion. It had an unusual mantra for an antiwar rally: “I’m not opposed to all wars,” Mr. Obama repeated again and again, making his point as narrowly as possible.
Similarly, in the recent presidential debates, the candidates twice wrangled over the same question: how should the government cut spending? Mr. McCain called for an across-the-board freeze, but Mr. Obama resisted. “That’s using a hatchet,” he said. “I want to use a scalpel,” he continued, once again bypassing broad principle for a case-by-case approach.
A commitment to dialogue
As a law professor at the University of Chicago, Mr. Obama taught a young woman named Uzma Sattar, who was unpopular in class, students said, because of comments she made that others frequently found abrasive. But in a recent interview Ms. Sattar said that Mr. Obama, whom she visited during office hours, was kinder to her than any other faculty member — the only one, she said, who seemed to understand the loneliness of being the sole woman to wear a headscarf.
Barack Obama prides himself on trying to see the world through others’ eyes. In his books, he slips into the heads of his Kenyan relatives, teenage mothers in Chicago, Reagan Democrats, bean farmers in Southern Illinois, and evangelical Christian voters.
He won the presidency of the Harvard Law Review in part because, weeks before voting, he made a speech in favor of affirmative action that so eloquently summarized the objections to it that the Review’s conservatives decided he felt their concerns deeply.
That very first presidential election, carried out in the law school’s stately, leaf-strewn quadrangle, would prove typical of Mr. Obama’s lifelong quest to mediate conflict, and of the way that goal has merged with his own quest for advancement. He wants those on each side of the most toxic conflicts in American life — over race, faith, abortion — to resolve their differences, and in resolving them, to join his cause as well. He has a deep philosophical commitment to dialogue, suggesting that more of it will heal America’s bruised standing in the world, and he has expressed far more willingness to meet with enemies than his primary or general election opponents.
But Mr. Obama’s efforts to relate to everyone can get him in trouble. He initially placed the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his pastor and an incendiary speaker, at the center of his candidacy, titling a book after one of his sermons and originally asking him to speak at the announcement that he would run for president. (Mr. Obama eventually canceled.) “Reverend Wright is a child of the ’60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through,” he explained in an interview. It took another year and a potentially mortal threat to his campaign for him to sever ties with the minister.
Mr. Obama’s tendency to see things from the perspectives of others, aides say, meant that during the primaries, he could not work up much antipathy for his rivals.
“He’s not consumed by hatred for his opponents,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist.
In fact, Mr. Obama can be overly familiar with them. When Mr. Obama draped a hand across Cindy McCain’s back after the second presidential debate, she stiffened visibly. He has done the same to President Bush and Mrs. Clinton. In 2004, he approached Alan Keyes, his opponent in the Senate race, at a parade and the situation grew so tense that aides had to diffuse it.
“It’s an uninvited embrace,” said Stanley Renshon, a psychologist who studies presidents, of a habit that Mr. Obama has called unconscious. “Bridging has to be an invitation, not a hand in the back pushing you towards something.”
Bridging the divide
As a teenager, Mr. Obama, son of a white woman from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, wanted little more than to feel like an African-American. Training his eyes on a grainy television in his grandparents’ Hawaii apartment, he imitated the dance steps on “Soul Train” and Richard Pryor’s outrageous jokes. He locked himself in his bedroom to read James Baldwin and Malcolm X.
Decades later, Mr. Obama is a proud son of the African-American community, and at campaign events with black voters, the connection is visceral. He can seem both more relaxed and more animated than usual, stretching out his stump speech into something more like a sermon, luxuriating in the call-and-response with the crowd.
Most of the time, Mr. Obama speaks lightly of the historic nature of his candidacy, and he is something of a postracial figure, with too many varied influences and constituencies to count. But a few times during the campaign — on the night of his Iowa caucus victory; in Philadelphia when he spoke of America’s failure to grapple with the original sin of slavery — Mr. Obama allowed voters to see just how heavily the country’s divided past sits on his slender shoulders. That weight seems like part of the answer to a central Obama mystery: where all of that burning ambition comes from, what possesses him to push so hard and so fast.
Nearly two decades ago at Harvard, Mr. Obama had his first taste of a barrier-smashing presidential victory, one that made other students weep with jubilation.
Gordon Whitman, one of the classmates who decided that long-ago election, recalled: “We all understood there was a chance to make history.”
This report, "Barack Obama, Forever Sizing Up," originally appeared in the New York Times.
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