Words. For Your Consideration..."Seeking to make sense of Barack Obama's first year as president -- and why he has come across as competent but less magical than many Americans hoped -- I've been rereading his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father."
To revisit that memoir is to be reminded of what a mixed-up childhood the president had. The brilliant but troubled Kenyan father who abandoned his teenage bride and their infant son. The footloose mother who took "Barry" to Indonesia with a second husband, then shipped him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. The sense of alienation he felt as a young black man growing up with few African American friends or role models.
Given all that rejection and dislocation in his youth, is it any wonder Obama became so invested in imposing order on his adult life? Chubby as a kid, wayward as a teen, he developed formidable personal discipline, down to his daily exercise routine and abstemious eating and drinking habits. He made a home for himself in Chicago and sought out the stability of marriage and fatherhood.
Obama also aspired to bring order to the world around him. He set out to resolve urban disputes as a community organizer; he made peace between student factions as editor of the Harvard Law Review; he ran for office as a bridge-builder who could unite blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans.
As a candidate for president, that disciplined, linear, conciliatory approach to life helped Barack Obama defeat the fractious campaigns of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. It was exactly the right temperament to help Americans avert a fiscal and emotional meltdown in the early days of the financial crisis.
But as the French say, we all have the faults of our virtues. In President Obama's case, the highly organized defenses he developed as a result of his dysfunctional childhood may have left him ill-prepared to confront the more unruly forces of cynicism, egotism and self-interest that hold sway in Washington, on Wall Street and on the world stage."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Lessons from Obama's first year
