Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News

For some time the Obama administration had appeared to be signaling its likely approval of a plan to lay a high-pressure oil pipeline from Canadian tar sands right on top of the main water supply to much of the Midwest. Last week, however, after thousands of protesters — ranging from ranchers and farmers to ordinary Americans concerned about the catastrophic harm that could be done if that pipeline were to leak — surrounded the White House, the administration announced that it was delaying a decision until 2013.

For a Democratic president who campaigned on turning America into a powerhouse of clean energy and stemming the tide of climate change (which so many Americans saw this year with their own eyes, as unprecedented floods, tornadoes, wildfires, and extreme weather swept virtually every region of the country), this should not have been a difficult decision. Although some progressive and conservative groups alike assume that this is the beginning of the end for the pipeline, what no one knows is what deals the administration may have struck with the oil industry, just as no one knew for a year, as pundits endlessly debated the popular “public option” in health care reform, that the president had cut a deal with health care industry executives to block it the year before.

Expanding production of one of the dirtiest, most difficult to extract (and hence least energy-efficient) fuels on earth is something one might have expected from the former oilman George W. Bush, not from his successor. The oil industry is trying to change the name of tar sands to “oil sands,” and for good reason: “tar sands” polls badly, because the term leads people to picture something dirty, thick and toxic. And it turns out their gut-level reaction is accurate: Strip-mining of tar sands creates craters as wide as the Grand Canyon filled with toxic wastes. In one incident, 1,600 birds died after landing in a waste pond full of toxic chemicals from tar sands.

The decision to put off a political decision has turned out to be a defining characteristic of this administration. Typically the magic number is 2013, although 2014 and 2020 are popular second-choices. Just two months ago, under heavy lobbying from polluters, the president took both supporters and members of his own administration aback with a decision to override a plan produced by his own Environmental Protection Agency to tighten the lax Bush standards on clean air to prevent toxic smog. The president who had campaigned on restoring the role of science in decision-making overrode the judgment of a unanimous panel of scientists, suggesting that he wanted to “study” the issue further — perhaps until 2013.

Obama’s 2013 Doctrine doesn’t just apply to energy. When he made his “grand bargain” over the summer that cut over a trillion dollars from the budget — in 2013 — he created the Congressional committee charged with cutting at least another $1.2 trillion — to take effect in, you guessed it, 2013.

The question is why a president who likes to talk about being the “adult in the room” with Congressional Democrats and Republicans so frequently employs delaying tactics that look remarkably like the ones employed by my 7-year-old at bedtime. She’s happy to go to bed — just after another glass of water, another chocolate milk (okay, I’m a lousy parent, but she really likes it), or another light turned on or off.

One possibility is that the administration believes this is good politics. By delaying the oil pipeline decision, the president left some supporters with the impression that he would cancel the project after the election or let it die a slow death, while simultaneously preventing Republicans from readily attacking him for opposing domestic (or at least Canadian) oil production, not to mention jobs.

Pool photo by Stefan Postles

The problem with that explanation is that it’s actually very bad politics. After his grand bargain on the debt, for example, the president’s approval ratings plummeted. The intended message was “I’m willing to compromise,” but most voters just saw weakness. Matters were even worse the summer before with the president’s signature issue, health care reform. The law might well have catapulted Democrats to victory rather than a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm elections if its most popular provisions — especially the elimination of “pre-existing conditions” and providing coverage for tens of millions of working people who can’t afford insurance — had taken effect in September of 2010, instead of in 2013 and 2014.

Instead of letting Americans see the impact of the law on their own lives at a time when they desperately needed a shot in the arm, the White House and the Democrats allowed most of the benefits of the law (other than those that applied to children, including grown children living in the basement because they couldn’t find work) to remain hypothetical while increases in insurance premiums and the continued elimination of employer-based insurance were anything but hypothetical to the average family, which was already struggling to make ends meet.

A second possibility is that the president either doesn’t know or doesn’t want anyone else to know what he believes. During the 2008 election, I remember listening incredulously to focus groups as swing voters would repeatedly say about a man they had watched for two years, “I don’t know who he is.” Now I understand what they meant. No modern American president has ever managed to make it through nearly three years in the White House with so few people really having any idea what he believes on so many key issues — let alone what his vision for the country is.

Does he believe that the way to stimulate an anemic economy is to stimulate demand or to contract it with budget cuts? (He’s taken both positions within the last six months.) Does he believe that the rich and big corporations should pay more (as he has repeatedly said) or less (as he ended up negotiating for less than a year ago, when he had a lame duck Democratic Congress behind him)? Does he believe bankers should take personal responsibility for the damage they’ve done to millions of people’s lives and livelihoods (as he has repeatedly said) or that they should be immune from investigation, let alone prosecution (the position his administration has taken as it has tried to twist the arms of state attorneys general who don’t think that’s right)?

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about an Obama-Romney election would be the question of who could hold out longer without the public discovering what they actually believe.

A third possibility is that the president is tied up in the knots of indecision because he lacks the passion that motivates decision-making and distrusts or fears precisely the emotions that allow us to choose between one course of action or another. Decades ago, psychoanalysts identified a particular personality style common among high-achieving men (although not limited to them), and in recent years researchers have been hot on its trail. People with this style (not narcissism, although that would be a good guess) prefer to see themselves as logical and rational, uninfluenced by emotion, and to think in abstract and intellectualized ways, as if emotions were irrelevant or inconsequential to decision making — when in fact they are essential to it. Whether that describes this president I cannot say, although he has been described by a close aide, and similarly by others, as “the most unsentimental man I’ve ever met.” And it could certainly make sense of how a president of the United States could take two weeks away from Washington at precisely the moment he has empowered a “supercommittee” to make just the kinds of decisions about the fate of the nation that it’s hard to imagine a president choosing to leave to somebody else.

Ultimately, the president’s delay tactics may work for him, as he runs out the clock while Americans are still trying to figure out who he is. The Republicans are having so much trouble finding a candidate sane enough for the country to elect but crazy enough for their base that Obama may well be able to run unemployment up to 10 percent and still keep the one job that seems to matter the most to him. But the question is why he wants to.

Perhaps we’ll find out in 2013.

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”