Think of this as Volume 12, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Every President brings their past life with them to the Oval Office, and this defines how they perform.
George W. Bush, for instance, was pampered from the cradle, a diffident student, indulged as an adult, and a failure at everything he tried that did not involve pulling strings. We should have seen his Presidency coming.
In the past Presidents usually came from inside the government. Governors, Senators, diplomats, Generals. Some came to politics as a second career, but most had been striving up the greasy pole of power all their lives.
The present incumbent is the first whose life has been the classroom. Combine his years as a student with those he spent making his living as a teacher at the University of Chicago (while serving in the state legislature) and Barack Obama has spent three-fourths of his life in the classroom.
He is the first teacher President.
Like the best teachers, and the best students, the President is calm, and works to keep emotions separate from the subject at hand. He has also learned patience. He believes in merit, and that solutions to problems are possible. He practices order, but he also knows how to separate his life from his work.
We have seen this repeatedly in his first 100 days of office. On the podium he lectures, or extemporizes with whole paragraphs made up of coherent sentences. In meetings he mostly listens, while remaining the authority figure. He also knows the limits of his own knowledge, and wants the people around him to be smarter, in their areas of expertise, than he can possibly be.
In the run-up to the election there was a great deal of speculation over where he got the traits that define him. The brains and ambitions came from his father, Barack Obama Sr.. The salesmanship came from his grandfather, Stanley Dunham. His politics and love of learning came from his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and his calm came from his step-father, Mr. Seotoro. His role model for living is most likely his late grandmother, who changed each night from a business suit to a muumuu in order to get him supper. His rhetorical style evolved from his work in Chicago.
But it was education -- Punahou School, Occidental College, Columbia, Harvard Law, the University of Chicago -- that made him the man he is. He is, more than any President in our past, a tribute to American education, especially the liberal arts.
The President who comes closest to this ideal is John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy was not that close at all. He was an indifferent student whose defining experience was as a P.T. boat captain during World War II, and who spent the largest part of his adult life in Washington D.C. His "best and brightest" were those with old school ties.
This President casts a wider net, and he has staffed his Administration mainly with those who have practiced public service -- Governors, state regulators, high-ranking academics. Skeptics wondered if he could build an Administration without lobbyists and tycoons. On the whole he has done just that.
Recent Comments