President Barack Obama came to American voters as a community organizer who could build consensus to tackle the hardest issues. He ran, not on his slight record, but on his personality.
For his early followers, it was his temperament that won them over and his temperament that made them stay. Last November, his “famously unflappable temperament” was mainly responsible for catapulting Obama to the most exalted position of power in the world.
As The Washington Post said when endorsing then-Senator Obama last fall:
“Mr. Obama’s temperament is unlike anything we’ve seen on the national stage in many years. He is deliberate but not indecisive; eloquent but a master of substance and detail; preternaturally confident but eager to hear opposing points of view.”
Tastes great and less filling!
But the fawning of his supporters aside, his temperament was the deciding factor for many swing voters.
The crucial moment of the 2008 campaign came when John McCain suspended his campaign on Sept. 24 to focus on the negotiations over the first Wall Street bailout.
Obama had been slipping away with the election as voter worries about the seemingly imminent demise of American capitalism mounted. But with his suspension and call for the postponement of the presidential debate at the end of the week, McCain grabbed the spotlight.
McCain seemed bold and maybe a little wild, too. Obama started to look a little bloodless as McCain charged into the fray.
But then McCain did … nothing. He didn’t denounce bailouts or say that he’d rather lose an election rather than see Wall Street fat cats saved from their own failures.
McCain ended up debating in unremarkable fashion and looked foolish for having made such a flap and then doing essentially the same thing as Obama.
More than anything else, McCain’s moves that week sealed the election for Obama, who remained calm through the whole affair.
By the time of his election, the hype surrounding his temperament had made Obama into the liberal vision of a pragmatic idealist. The Democrats’ Ronald Reagan. The liberal who could be passionate without seeming hysterical. The unwilling gladiator who still fights to win.
Perhaps it is the deliberate response of someone who in his career has often had to fight being branded as an impractical overachiever.
It is certainly the Obama that his supporters adore. And it’s also the image that Obama has cultivated through his two autobiographies and new political brand.
Since taking office, the theme has remained. Obama said he didn’t want to have to rack up a $10 trillion deficit, nationalize Chrysler and General Motors or take over Wall Street, but they were the only pragmatic options in the face of an emergency.
But as the president continues to pile up new roles, responsibilities and powers for an already imperial executive branch, it’s getting harder for the White House and Obama’s supporters to argue that Obama is just a steady rock being buffeted by a stormy sea.
What instead comes through is someone so self-assured that he cannot resist testing his powers and abilities.
This week, the administration let it be known that it plans to regulate not just the salaries in the financial institutions already living off the taxpayers, but across the industry. Those who dismissed the warnings from those like The Washington Examiner’s Byron York that the move to control executive pay was just beginning with AIG now stand silent.
Picking that fight is not the act of a first-class temperament, but rather someone who likes to pick a fight.
Earlier in the week we saw just how intimate the president’s relationship with Chrysler would be as the White House vetoed the company’s advertising budget for the next nine weeks.
Obama certainly could have found a way to apply social Democratic principles to Detroit other than shredding bankruptcy laws and then dictating the small-scale decisions of a car company.
Someone who was “deliberate but not indecisive” would not have been so blithe. Those are the actions of a man who believes himself able to solve any problem — and wants to prove it.
A president “eager to hear opposing points of view” would not be suggesting that taking control of a fifth of the nation’s economy in the form of health care should be accomplished in two months — or else.
Perhaps it was McCain’s uneven temperament that made Obama look unflappable.
