David Runciman on Campaign Obama (With an Update)

David Runciman, reviewing books about the 2008 campaign, plays the game of might-have-been:

...Obama unquestionably comes across as the nicest, most reassuring boss, sensible, easy-going and relatively forgiving. The question is why this should matter. .... Obama is the one whose ambition [did] the least to corrode his decency as a human being. But there are glimpses of another Obama here too: the one who, lest we forget, floundered in debate after debate with Hillary Clinton, her 'mastery of the issues' making him come across as 'vague and weak and windy'. Obama's confidence in the face of his inadequate grip on policy often looks a lot like arrogance, and his great gifts only really flower in situations when he can remove himself from the fray. .... Obama is good at taking a detached view of other people's failings. It is not clear how good he is at taking a detached view of his own.

Obama unquestionably ran a better campaign than Hillary Clinton, but ... she would have made a better president. Indeed, despite the fact that he was obviously unelectable, I'm not sure that [John] Edwards wouldn't have been an improvement on Obama in some respects. Edwards had come to know a lot about healthcare reform, and he had thought seriously about the practical issues involved. He was clear about what he wanted to achieve, and he had some sense of the enemies he would have to make in order to achieve it. ... We spend too much time worrying about what politicians are like and how they behave, and not enough about what they might be able to achieve in the offices to which we elect them.

--David Runciman, "Enabler's Revenge,"
London Review of Books 3-10, 25 March 2010

Set aside for the moment the question whether "mastery of the issues" is necessary or even helpful for a successful presidency--I'll have to say that Obama certainly did appear more on top of things in he great health care summit a few weeks back than he did on the campaign trail (but this might have more to do with presentation style or delivery than actual content). Still, the larger point is telling: Obama has, indeed, shown an unsettling detachment in office--enough so that insiders like Nancy Pelosi evidently have been entreating him to be more assertive, to get more involved.

Or so it seemed until a couple of weeks ago. Lately we've had (a) his asserting himself (at last!) into the health care debate; (b) stories of how he got shirty with Dmitr Medvedev; (c) dramatic public evidence of his impatience with Benjamin Netanyahu; and (b) this weekend's in-your-face announcement of 15 (15!) "recess appointments" to the consternation of the Republican old bulls. Can it be that we are at long last seeing signs of a President who has finally grown a pair?