Thinking About Obama - David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes.com. published: October 16, 2008 :
We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now, and in all that time there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control. This has been a period of tumult, combat, exhaustion and crisis. And yet there hasn’t been a moment when he has displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness. the Obama calm. 'first rate temperament.'
Some candidates are motivated by something they lack. For L.B.J., it was respect. and for Nixon? For Bill Clinton, it was adoration. These politicians are motivated to fill that void. Their challenge once in office is self-regulation. How will they control the insecurities that fired their ambitions?
But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes. to realize his capacity ~ yes that seem right about Obama. not a drive for power, not a stark ambition, but a tough, forward-moving fulfillment of capacity.
that's an insufficient articulation of how it is not about personal power , ambition. also not exactly a calling, but closer to that, to a vocation. this is your work, you are good at it, you are suited to it, and you pursue it to the best of your ability. ..ok Brooks are you going to help me with this? ...oh: no. but it's int...
Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second.
He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician a person with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds. But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day. well, he had steady love from his mother, I think? and the solidity of her parents, his grandparents, who helped raise him. so the absent father was not the only and probably not the strongest influence in his life (though maybe loomed large wrt identity). I imagine he had a pretty solid base (but need to read Dreams straight thr to say that, not so solid if he could not 'trust' his childhood, if things were not as seemed ~ that yes is toxic.) and then it seems he found a home with Michelle, drawn to the rootedness of her family and finds solidity in her. ok that's the story, but it's a believable one.
There has never been a moment when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious. hmm. whoa Brooks that's a little bold of you, talk of the unconscious. I don't know. an organized *consciousness* I would say. self-awareness, yes. integrated. not troubled by the unconscious, no egregious ruptures. so maybe by organized that is what you mean: integrated. not a false self -a persona- with a silenced stirring true self beneath. integrated. Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for equanimity, and now he’s become a homeostasis machine.
When Bob Schieffer asked him tough questions during the debate Wednesday night, he would step back and describe the broader situation. When John McCain would hit him with some critique — even about fetuses being left to die on a table — he would smile in amusement at the political game they were playing hey he din't smile about the fetuses. and he made clear that there was already an existing law (as well as the doctor's hippocratic oath) requiring treatment to the infant in a botched abortion. At every challenging moment, his instinct was to self-remove and establish an observer’s perspective.mm maybe that's what I recognize in him.
Through the debate, he was reassuring and self-composed. McCain, an experienced old hand, would blink furiously over the tension of the moment, but Obama didn’t reveal even unconscious signs of nervousness. There was no hint of an unwanted feeling.
They say we are products of our environments, but Obama, the sojourner, seems to go through various situations without being overly touched by them. Over the past two years, he has been the subject of nearly unparalleled public worship, but far from getting drunk on it, he has become less grandiloquent as the campaign has gone along. [ "Don't underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don't underestimate our ability to screw it up." -- Sen. Barack Obama, quoted last night by the Chicago Sun Times . [link 10/17] ]
When Bill Clinton campaigned, he tried to seduce his audiences. But at Obama rallies, the candidate is the wooed not the wooer. He doesn’t seem to need the audience’s love. But they need his. The audiences hunger for his affection, while he is calm, appreciative, didactic. maybe I recognize this as well. and that, maybe, comes up a relation to an absence. you are not hungry, you are not making an appeal. what you want is just not there. it's not there to want.
He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan. "not a movement candidate" - keep going back to that, seems key to much about how he has behaved, how he has disappointed ppl at Harvard Law Rvw, in Chicago.
It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather —already has gathered— some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem. Of course, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. It could be that Obama will be an observer, not a leader. No, I on't think so. He has moved forward pretty aggressively, he seems very comfortable taking control. 'Look. Here's what we're going to do.'

Over the past two years, Obama has clearly worn well with voters. Far from a celebrity fad, he is self-contained, self-controlled, maybe even a little dull.