INTRODUCTION

For we are strangers before them, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.

 

—Exordium chosen by Barack Obama for Dreams from My Father, drawn from I Chronicles

The Unanswered Question

What kind of a leader is Barack Obama?

Strangely enough, for a president in his fourth year of office, this remains an open question.

So far the press has been uncharacteristically reluctant to probe the nature of Obama’s leadership abilities. Part of the reason is that ideology colors the coverage and obscures Obama, the real leader. Instead the media presents an empty screen on which are projected the hopes and fears of partisans, Left and Right, leading his enemies to overestimate him and his friends to misunderstand him.

On the Right, Obama is seen as an evil genius with a dark, complex plan to ruin America. On the establishment Left, he is portrayed as a man dealing with immense problems inherited from his unpopular predecessor, who, through it all, somehow has racked up historic achievements. Bill Keller, a New York Times columnist, writes that Obama’s critics overlook his “real accomplishments, achieved despite a brutally divided government. Lost in the shouting is the fact that Obama pulled the country back from the brink of depression; signed a health care reform law that expands coverage, preserves choice, and creates a mechanism for controlling costs; engineered fairly stringent financial regulatory reform; and authorized the risky mission that got Osama bin Laden.” All true enough, but misleading and avoid the issue of Obama’s leadership abilities.

Both of these dueling media narratives—Left and Right—fail to consider Obama, the leader. They embody opinions only about the outcomes of Obama’s decisions, not the process that made those decisions. They tell us the media’s take on his decisions, not the quality of those decisions.

So the question remains: What kind of a leader is Barack Obama?

Evaluating Obama’s leadership abilities means investigating his signal successes, those banner-headline moments he will campaign on in 2012 to make the case for his reelection. Hidden in each success (and in some dangerous failures) is a case study in how Obama makes presidential decisions. The only way to probe his leadership abilities is to interview participants and eyewitnesses in the White House, in Congress, in the Pentagon, and in several foreign capitals. This is what I set out to do in the pages that follow.

The Mystery

Barack Obama is the most mysterious manager of our age.

He appeared suddenly, like a meteor dropping from the night sky. Within four years of his first, fleeting appearance on the stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he became president of the United States. He had moved so quickly that his 2008 presidential campaign felt compelled to repeatedly reintroduce him, to tell his life story in flickering videos and campaign speeches. When his autobiography was reissued during the campaign, it became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Its sales were driven by curiosity, an urgent desire to know: Who is he?

The mystery did not burn away in the heat of the presidency, the most public office in the world. As president, he has remained surprisingly aloof, distant, and private. He stands apart in our joined-up, interconnected, social-networked world. In a hint of self-criticism in his autobiography, he writes: “I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”1 Indeed, Obama may be the most solitary man to hold the office of president.

Social circles usually widen as presidents build alliances and recruit the public to their side. Strangely, Obama’s circle shrank. State dinners, public receptions, and private moments with the barons and baronesses of Washington, were few. His disdain for official Washington was not a campaign pose, but a genuine feeling, welling from a deep inner spring.

It is not that he dislikes power or the perks that come with it—his elated explanation to Oprah Winfrey about the joys of having White House butlers, servants, guards, and other attendants testifies to that. But he dislikes the public give-and-take of politics. He distrusts the idea that political decisions are supposed to be a collaborative enterprise involving experts and executives with conflicting interests, similar to making a movie or running a corporation. Instead he wants the presidency to be more like writing a book or commanding a battalion, a lone decider who hands down commands. He retreats from people, aside from a small trusted circle, because he believes power is sullied when it is shared.

As a result, even old friends found themselves marooned. Christopher Edley Jr., the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school had been a friend and informal advisor to Obama for years. Often he would phone or text ideas or mild critiques to Obama while he was on the campaign trail. When he wrote the president a short note to take issue with a public statement in 2010, he received a call from Obama’s most powerful and influential advisor, Valerie Jarrett. She said the president did not appreciate his remarks. The abruptness surprised the mild-mannered scholar. The president no longer tolerated even moderate criticism from a friendly liberal source.

And the president famously said he didn’t want any “new friends.” There is no evidence that Obama has added many “new friends” since he moved to the White House, except for a handful of Secret Service agents. One trusted friend, presidential “body man” Reggie Love, has even left his position at the White House to earn his master’s degree.

Isolation—more than previous presidents—seems to be the rule in the Obama White House.

Informal moments paint the picture. When watching his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers win the 2009 Super Bowl, Obama didn’t mix much with the guests packed in the yellow-walled Oval Room in the White House residence. (The White House staff, not the president or first lady, had invited most of the guests.) Obama sat directly before the television, positioned in the front of the room, with an empty seat to his right. To his left sat a longtime pal, Marty Nesbitt, an African American from Chicago who plays no formal role in national politics. Behind the president were clustered other longtime Chicago friends, with Attorney General Eric Holder leaning confidently against a wall. Virtually everyone physically close to the president was African American and linked to Chicago. Farther back sat Congressman Mike Doyle, a reliable white Democrat from Pittsburgh, where the Steelers hail from. Farther back still were other political supporters. The Washington insiders were packed into the outer reaches of the room, like Pluto elliptically orbiting a distant sun.

In a telling photo, Obama is shown pumping his two arms in the air, the nearby faces of his friends alive with joy. The mood fades, though, as you move away from the president. In the back of the room, the Washington crowd is almost out of focus and seemingly unsure of what is expected of them. Only two people are cheering along with the president.2 Pluto is a cold planet.

The photo, taken by Obama insider Pete Rouse, was snapped during the ascendant, triumphant period of the first Obama years. It was 2009, when Democrats controlled all the elected branches of the federal government, the country overwhelmingly supported the new president, and many hopeful changes seemed possible. The Steelers were winning. Yet Obama seemed almost alone.

Obama’s solitary style shows up during the workday, too. Even West Wing staffers—people who in any other presidency are the president’s “inner circle”—say the president rarely makes a decision in their presence. He may announce decisions that he has already made, but he doesn’t wrestle with dilemmas in front of his staff or demand additional options from them, as Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush often did. When he collects opinions in staff meetings, he rarely gives his own. Indeed, after extensive briefings with the president, staffers say, they often have no hint as to what his eventual decision will be. Or, whether he will decide at all.

Instead, he prefers to retreat to a makeshift private office on the White House’s third floor—the Treaty Room, near the Lincoln Bedroom—where, at a paper-stacked antique table, with ESPN droning from a television near the fireplace, he ponders and weighs. He does his best thinking after he has had dinner with his wife and daughters. Usually, he is there at night, when no moving traffic is visible in the ornate window frame. He is, almost always, alone.

His solitariness, an unusual quality in a politician or public figure, is a lifelong feature. As a boy in Indonesia, he often played and studied alone. He confesses in his first autobiography that, as a student and a young man, he was “prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”3

It is a habit of mind encouraged by his mother, who raised him nearly alone. His father disappeared to Harvard and then Nairobi when Barack Obama Jr. was two. His adoptive father rarely spent time with him.

Obama’s mother herself was often described as “solitary and bookish.”4 He is very much his mother’s son.

What critics call his “aloofness,” or even “arrogance,” is actually a brooding nature common to writers and scholars. While nineteenth-century voters might have prized this quality, Obama’s seeming coolness in today’s hotter age actually slowed his political rise during the 1990s. Voters have come to demand less Calvin Coolidge and more Oprah Winfrey. While Obama is a gifted public speaker, his private coolness led his colleagues in the Illinois legislature to complain that he was cold and “thought too much.”5

The counterpart to this brooding isolation is often a paralyzing caution. He voted “present”—rather than “yea” or “nay”—more than eighty times in the Illinois statehouse and in the U.S. Senate, sometimes when his Democratic colleagues sorely needed his vote.

Barack Obama brought both of these character traits to the presidency.

Usually the arc of a president’s prior career guides how he makes decisions. Ronald Reagan, we now know, made decisions like a Hollywood director, orchestrating events and ruling out options quickly.

Like the former governor he was, Bill Clinton liked to debate the details with his staff, constantly turning an issue around to look at its different facets. Clinton’s advisors said he saw the presidency as a “contact sport,” always trying to determine the equilibrium between what he hoped to achieve and what the balance of political forces would allow him to achieve. He liked to brainstorm with staff, deep into the night.

George W. Bush ran the presidency like the Harvard MBA that he was, having earned it in his formative years. He preferred a well-defined bureaucratic process with a managed gauntlet of deadlines before approaching a winnowed set of options, which his advisors would present to him. He preferred things to be orderly and deliberate; rarely were decisions made on the fly and always in concert with staff.

Obama’s decision-making style is harder to describe. Asked for one adjective to sum up the president’s leadership style, P. J. Crowley, the former State Department spokesman for Hillary Clinton in the Obama years, and National Security Council spokesman in the Clinton years, settled upon this phrase: “very corporate.”6 He means that the Obama White House is much less freewheeling than in the Clinton days, his point of comparison. Pushed a bit, Crowley conceded that once decisions reach the president’s desk, no one knows what happens. Aides are consulted, memos scribbled on, questions asked, but in the end Obama decides alone, in an upper room where even the West Wing staff dare not intrude.

Bush and Clinton were isolated in the sense that leaders usually are and presidents always are. But, still, they were highly engaged in a communal decision-making process that was specified and styled to their own personal needs.

By contrast, Barack Obama, a former constitutional scholar and lawmaker, has no executive or managerial habits to guide him. Throughout his career, he was always at a lectern or a committee table. Importantly, he never ran a major committee in the Illinois or U.S. Senate. He alone could choose what to teach or what vote to take. He never led a campaign to pass a controversial piece of legislation. He rarely, if ever, had to compromise, coach, or cajole. In his entire career he flew solo, with the counsel of a handful of trusted associates.

Nor does his life story tell us about his qualities as a leader. We know the bare facts of his biography: raised by a single mother in Hawaii and Indonesia; a community organizer; a state lawmaker, a U.S. Senator. We know the historic results attributed to him: first black president; health care reform; killing bin Laden. But we simply don’t know what kind of a leader he is.

The most important things we need to know about any leader are: Is he decisive or dilatory? How does he manage people and priorities? What are his priorities? Can he inspire in private and in public? What does he do when he fails? What is his vision? Are his goals important and realistic?

These questions matter because 120 million voting Americans will soon have to choose the next president in what will be the most consequential national election in a generation.

Answering the Question

The case for reelecting Barack Obama rests on four pillars: victories in Congress (principally health care reform); victories in war (mainly dispatching Osama bin Laden); management of global financial and security crises; and maintenance of key foreign alliances (with Israel and the Arab world). Two other crises are also key measures of Obama’s management abilities: the national debt crisis of 2011, and Operation Fast and Furious, a Justice department sting that killed at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent, funneled more than 1,000 guns into the hands of lethal Mexican drug cartels, and led Attorney General Eric Holder to stonewall and mislead investigators in both houses of Congress.

By investigating each of these consequential decisions in the coming six chapters, we can map out how the president manages in crises. In the process, we will discover just what kind of a leader Barack Obama is.

In the end, we will at last be able to answer the question first raised by Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic nomination fight: how does Obama respond as a president whom he gets a crisis-call at 3 A.M.?