As president, Obama has been neither what his allies nor his critics expected. The conventional president

Barack Obama was a man of uncommon background and uncommon talents, a visionary, a transformational leader. That’s what his supporters believed as Obama accepted a presidential nomination on a stage lined with Greek columns in Denver in 2008.

The skeptics were just as certain of their own view. Obama was a political exotic, a cultural and ideological radical obscuring his real intentions behind billowy phrases and naively adoring crowds.


Four years later, as the president this week arrives in Charlotte, N.C., to justify his first term and make the case for a second, it is clear that one side’s hopes and the other’s fears both failed dramatically to anticipate the reality of Obama. He is not a 21st-century FDR; nor is he a Jeremiah Wright-style radical in the Oval Office.

( Also on POLITICO: Full coverage of the Democratic convention)

He is a man of conventional instincts, practicing conventional politics, sitting atop what has been a mostly conventional presidency.

No one could doubt that Obama is governing in extraordinary times: an economy that flirted with depression and is still struggling to stand; two wars abroad; a capital consumed by partisan malice.

The surprise is that a leader who arrived in office amid such unprecedented times and with such an unusual biography would infuse his presidency with such a relentlessly familiar style.

The expectation was that Obama represented a new brand of politics, marshaling ideas, language and tactics in ways that would constitute a break from Democratic orthodoxy. The reality is that Obama, so far, has presented no set of ideas that collectively represent anything that might last beyond his term as “Obamism.” His West Wing staff, and his governing agenda, have their roots deep in the traditional Democratic soil of Chicago and Capitol Hill.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama aims for Truman's path)

The expectation was that Obama’s governing style would find fresh uses of the presidential platform, inspiring public pressure to forge new governing coalitions. The reality is that Obama by his own admission has not used his pulpit in creative ways — failing to “tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism,” as he told a CBS News interviewer this summer. And, far from breaking a generation-long partisan standoff in Washington, Obama’s presidency has been almost entirely defined by it.

The expectation was that Obama would be a dazzling personal presence in Washington, lighting the capital with an electric surge of power and glamour that would revive JFK’s Camelot with an African-American hue. The reality is that Obama’s cultural impact has been virtually nil. His weekends are that of a typical middle-aged suburban professional, hanging out with wife and daughters, except when he’s not retreating with a small collection of friends to the basketball court or golf course.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama, party of one)

To call a politician conventional is hardly a stinging insult. Political customs are the product of experience and consensus among accomplished people. Yet no one was more robust in encouraging the public to think of him as unconventional — not a politician but a phenomenon — as Obama himself. His desire to not simply reverse the policies of George W. Bush’s administration but dramatically change the practice of politics was embedded in most every speech he delivered in 2008.

If Washington, or Obama himself, was surprised by the triumph of conventional thinking in this presidency, it was because people did not understand the arc of Obama’s career before the presidency, according to his most accomplished biographers. The assumption that Obama was unconventional was based almost entirely on one factor: race.

“What was there in his political persona, aside from the color of his skin, that offered a profound sense of doing things differently?” asked David Maraniss, associate editor of The Washington Post and author of “Barack Obama: The Story.” “His life in so many ways was a long search for the normal, the conventional, in both his private and public life, after such an unusual and unconventional upbringing,” which took him from Hawaii to Indonesia and back.

“I think it was clear in 2008, and clearer now, that the only thing that was truly radical about Barack Obama was the radicalism of being the first African-American president,” agreed David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker and author of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has written several presidential histories and has come to know Obama personally, said the 44th president’s policies — such as a stimulus package that may have averted another Depression and an overhaul of health care policy — most likely will be seen as profoundly far-reaching. But in contrast to the soaring expectations Obama himself helped set, Goodwin said his tenure is viewed through the prism of his failure to transcend the deep divisions in Washington.

“The country assumed what he meant by [being] transformational was that he would get the two sides to come together because our first image of a leader just sticks,” Goodwin said, citing his famous 2004 Democratic convention speech when he called for an end to mindless partisanship.

*************

It wasn’t just the country that had expectations for a transformative presidency. These were Obama’s expectations, too. When he was running against Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008, Obama in a Reno newspaper interview cited Ronald Reagan as a better role model than Bill Clinton, because of the way Reagan had fundamentally altered the national debate in ways that outlasted his actual time in office.

Yet the agenda he pursued reflected conventional Democratic priorities. Little surprise that the people around him were likewise conventional — intelligent and deeply devoted aides who with rare exceptions were standard-issue political staffers, most with careers begun on Capitol Hill and few with deep immersion in the world of ideas.

“Where’s the Moynihan, where’s the Kissinger? There’s nobody that can go broader and deeper,” said Evan Thomas, a veteran journalist and biographer. “The consulting class and hacks have taken over. It’s former congressional staffers playing small-ball.”

The embrace of conventionality is pervasive in this year's campaign. In 2008, Obama's message blurred standard political lines and won several historically GOP states. This year he has followed a check-the-box strategy aimed mostly at motivating traditional Democratic constituencies through highly targeted appeals.

The political operative ethos of this West Wing is seen in how reflexively Obama reacts to outside pressure, such as whether to dump a troublesome appointee overboard.

Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor and Obama’s first White House chief of staff, dismissed as absurd the notion that the president’s first term could be called conventional. Obama averted economic catastrophe through a stimulus measure, while also enacting seismic reforms in both the health care and financial services sectors — achievements that almost by definition are not conventional, Emanuel argued.

“You can’t call him conventional because the problems had no precedent in order to create a convention,” Emanuel said, adding that the consistent theme of Obama’s presidency is that he is “pragmatic, nonideological, results oriented.”

Pragmatic goals were achieved almost entirely with Democratic votes, a fact that highlights one reason Obama has had a conventional governing approach. To be creative in forging new coalitions, Obama would have benefited from an opposition party animated by something other than an intense and seemingly implacable desire to destroy his presidency.

Remnick argued that the dominant political fact of this era is “the radicalization of the Republican Party.” While Obama was sometimes portrayed as a Martin Luther King Jr.-like figure, this was always misleading: “He is not King, who was the leader of a movement. He is a conventional politician, whose capacity to act and move are limited by the presence or nonpresence of political forces in society. Now, you would argue that the president shapes those forces. To some extent, yes. But he can’t do it all alone at his soapbox. And the political forces in society, many of them, are on the tea party side of the ledger.”

Richard Norton Smith, a presidential historian, said Obama has labored to find a political strategy and rhetoric that matches his outsize ambitions. “He’s not a transformative figure. But you have to find circumstances that are amenable to your political skills and personal talents to be so,” Smith said. “In a bizarre way, FDR had a clean field after three years of absolute despair. You had people like Walter Lippmann saying we need a dictator for a while. That climate didn’t exist in 2009.”

Obama also arrived in the Oval Office with a skill set better tailored for campaigning than governing.

“Here’s a guy who has two gifts from God, one his brain and the other his ability to speak to a crowd and move them,” said former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. “But he never had a job where he managed anything, never had to learn management.”

Many people believe that Obama had a chance to break the chains of conventional partisan combat during his first term. The opportunity was when the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles deficit commission, a group that Obama had willed into creation, came back with a package of spending cuts, including on popular entitlement programs, and revenue increases, mainly through reforming the Tax Code. Obama, deferring to deep skepticism in his own party and opposition among congressional Republicans, brushed this proposal aside. Particularly for centrists, Simpson-Bowles became a sort of shorthand representing what could have been.

“That was an inflection point because it became clearly evident at that moment that they were in campaign mode,” said Dave McCurdy, a former Oklahoma Democratic congressman who maxed out to Obama in 2008 but has kept his checkbook closed this year. “He no longer cared about policy; the reelection was more important than policy. It was probably the last opportunity to present another bipartisan approach. It made the president appear smaller.”

Judd Gregg, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire who was briefly tapped by Obama to be commerce secretary before withdrawing, said he concluded Obama’s promise of unconventional governance was always a mirage.

“He ran on phraseology rather than on programs. He’s a great deliverer of a speech. And he is a genuine transition figure for our nation. I was proud we elected an African-American president. But people just looked past specifics.”

*****

Obama defenders call that unfair, even as they acknowledge that a politician who arrived in office buoyed by the strength of his personal biography has not yet succeeded in creating an overarching philosophy, nor promoted his ideas with fresh imagery and or language that echoes.

“Given the depth of our economic problems, he’s not defining himself ideologically in one place or another but is more focused on trying to solve our enormous problems,” said Jack Markell, the governor of Delaware and former chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

“He is a pragmatist, perhaps more of a pragmatist than an idealist,” said Maraniss. “Dealing with each problem individually and rationally makes it harder for him to frame a larger philosophy. He bought into hope and change as a campaign message because he wants to win and saw that it was working, but he had little inclination to draw on what he viewed as superficial rhetorical tricks once he was elected. This is his contradiction.”

Obama has paid the price for his lack of a succinct way to explain a disparate agenda. “For a president to put his stamp on the minds of the people, there has to be a shorthand image of what he’s doing, something that people can say to someone else, ‘This is what he stands for,’” said Goodwin.

The lack of clarity allows people to impose their own hopes and fears on Obama, in ways that don’t necessarily work to his advantage. “He’s more American than the Republicans can stand and less magical than the liberals hoped for,” said Sam Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California in San Diego.

Beyond policy debates, Obama has not been especially creative in using the moral platform of the presidency to force change. This is an arena in which all presidents, naturally cautious and self-protective, tread carefully. But the contrast with some of Obama’s own role models is notable. When JFK faced an integration crisis at the University of Mississippi in 1963, he gave an Oval Office speech saying: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” When Obama decided to endorse gay marriage, he gave an interview to a morning television anchor and made clear that he was merely stating his personal preference and that the issue should be left to the states.

****

Another place where Obama’s instinct for the conventional comes through is in the way his presidency has touched the culture of Washington — far more faintly than many people had supposed it would.

When the Obamas first came to Washington, there was intense news media speculation about what church they would join, with many expecting they would join a historically black congregation in one of the capital’s African-American neighborhoods. Instead, the Obamas chose not to join a church as regular members, citing concern about intruding on other parishioners.

Many expected also they would inaugurate what Robert Frost at Kennedy’s inaugural called a “golden age of poetry and power,” with artists and intellectuals prominent among the first family’s friends and the Georgetown social scene regularly enlivened with the presence of a young and outgoing couple. In fact, the Obamas don’t entertain or go out much, and when they do it is mostly with close friends rather than the capital’s permanent elite. Nor has he made the White House a prominent hub of ideas.

Some would argue that politically, he had little choice. “Considering the political climate of Washington, and the degree of anti-intellectualism that is wielded so freely as a weapon, what do you think the reaction would be if he peacocked his learning in the law or literature or history in a way that was judged as flagrant or snobbish?” asked Remnick. “How soon would it be before we heard about Obama being even more ‘out of touch’ with ‘ordinary people’?”

But Thomas said the social side of Obama is of a piece with his larger presidency: “He’s boring. Yes, he’s got some good campaign skills and he’s a good human being but he’s ultimately not exciting.”

“The worst thing that ever happened to him was that he was saddled with a myth before he ever earned it,” said Smith. “The Nobel Prize now looks almost comical.”