The Washington Post‘s perceptive book critic Carlos Lozada examines the most lauded aspect of Barack Obama’s political profile—the president’s oratorical skills—and finds a troubling consistency: the primacy of Obama’s own personal story. “This was a presidency preoccupied with Obama’s exceptionalism as much as with America’s,” Lozada writes in this weekend’s Post.

Here’s an excerpt from Lozada’s essay that demonstrates how frequently Obama has grafted his own experience onto the problems and issues of the nation throughout his presidency: