New York magazine's John Heilemann has a typically excellent piece on "Season II" of the Obama White House, which really starts on Tuesday, when the president makes his State of the Union address.
Obama's greatest strength is his self-belief, which is almost unshakeable. But of course, this can be a weakness too. Heileman captures something of Obama's tendency to over-confidence in the following anecdote:
The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.” Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.
After spending most of the last two years ignoring his critics - just as he did during the campaign, and to great effect - he seems to have realised that some of them are talking sense. He and his White House have been too inward-looking and insular, too reactive, and too political, in the sense that the president has become a partisan figure rather than standing above the fray.
The midterm defeats administered a big enough shock to break through the complacency that forms the outer crust of Obama's deep self-belief. He and his closest advisers have woken up, later than everyone else, to the possibility that they might lose in 2012. To his credit, rather than turning further inward he has used the midterm pummelling to break out of his comfort zone, inviting a succession of outsiders to the White House to tell him what he's been getting wrong, and he has started acting on their advice. The biggest and most important manifestation of this course correction is the appointment of William Daley to chief of staff.
Heilemann suggests that the next two years will the White House trying to return to what the Obama campaign promised and embodied: calm, strategic, post-partisan leadership. Tucson was the overture. Act One begins tomorrow.
Full story here.
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