Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion that happened to have the President of the United States as one of the panelists. In our anti-monarchy, it was a sight beautiful to behold—the leader of the free world ambling onstage and settling into a chair just like the chairs occupied by his fellow-interlocutors, Robert Putnam, of Harvard, Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, and E. J. Dionne, of the Washington Post, and speaking about poverty and listening to the others while the bells of the university chapel chimed noonday in the background.

The event was a live, in-person distillation of so much of what so many of us cherish in this President: the serene intelligence, the lack of pretension, the clarity of thought and expression, the blend of affability and cool. At the same time, the event was an exhibition of Obama’s vaunted realism, which just now involves acknowledging limits in a voice that mingles regret and vexation at “my Republican friends,” as he calls them. In his opening remarks, he quoted a Biblical adage, “The poor will always be with us,” and, while he stressed that this adage shouldn’t be a cynical pretext to say that we can’t do anything about poverty, what followed suggested that Obama himself can’t do all that much—because an obstinate Congress holds the President and the poor in equal contempt, rendering the world’s most-powerful man something like an armchair public-policy analyst rather than a policy maker.

The discussion was part of a “poverty summit,” organized by Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, to bring Catholics and evangelicals together to ponder poverty. It was one in a series of events at Georgetown (where I am on the faculty) intended to unpack the Catholic social teachings at the root of Pope Francis’s pontificate. As far as I could tell, planning for the summit was well underway when conflicts between the police and the largely poor, black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, and then Baltimore, Maryland, placed poverty and inequality at the center of national discussion again. The events in Baltimore—about forty miles from Georgetown—hung over the day’s proceedings. So did the news (in the day’s Times) that the 2016 Presidential candidates scrupulously avoid using the term “middle class” on the grounds that it is insufficiently aspirational—too close to poverty, that is. So did Pope Francis’s planned September visit to Washington, where he will address a joint session of Congress.

The President’s appearance, then, couldn’t have been more timely or apt. And yet E. J. Dionne spoke for plenty of people there when he asked, “When do Presidents do panels? This is a very unusual position for a President to put himself in. Why are you doing this?”

It’s not that President Obama wasn’t Presidential. He strode out to a standing ovation and found just the right voice and body language to present himself graciously as first among equals. He described the need to move the conversation about poverty beyond a conversation with “a couple of straw men”: the liberal straw man, who sees a government fix for everything, and the conservative straw man, who thinks social policy begins and ends with the family. Instead, he said, family structures and policy must be seen as working together: “If, coming out of this conversation, we can have a both/and conversation rather than an either/or conversation, we’ll be making some progress.” As he stated the ideal, he embodied it, at once setting out an argument for higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans and speaking with authority about the ways in which the poverty of many black Americans is intertwined with family structure, the absence of black fathers (and wage-earners), in particular. “If I’m giving a commencement [address] at Morehouse,” he said, “I will have a conversation with young men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that.”

Not only was it Presidential. It showed how much Obama, and Bill Clinton before him, have raised our expectations for cultural literacy and intellectual sophistication in the White House. And yet it also suggested how our expectations for Presidential influence have, at the same time, diminished.

Half a century ago, Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist with deep roots in the Catholic Worker community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, wrote a short book about poverty, “The Other America.” The book, published in 1962, was reviewed in this magazine early the next year by Dwight Macdonald, himself a social thinker of consequence. As the story goes, President John F. Kennedy read the review, and perhaps the book, too, and Harrington’s thinking about poverty shaped the War on Poverty undertaken by Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson.

On the face of it, Robert Putnam is steps ahead of Harrington. His book about poverty, “Our Kids,” was published a couple months ago (and reviewed in this magazine), and already he has the President’s ear and eye. On “The Late Show With David Letterman” last week, Obama spoke about poverty in terms that clearly echoed the terms Putnam uses in his book: as a problem so pronounced that we now find ourselves not one society but two societies, one wired for prosperity, the other mired in poverty. At Georgetown, Obama alluded to the book effortlessly. “Our Kids,” he explained, is rooted in an evocation of the Ohio town of Putnam’s childhood, a town “where the banker is living in reasonable proximity to the janitor at the school, and where the banker’s daughter may be dating the janitor’s son.” It’s an evocation with a blind spot that Obama pointed out: when Putnam was growing up, there were common institutions and common goods, shared by all—except black people. “All those things were foreclosed to a big chunk of the minority population of this country—for decades,” the President said. He then extended his point to frame Putnam’s argument in his own terms: “What used to be racial segregation now mirrors itself in class segregation, this great sorting that’s taking place.”

It was all that a social scientist could wish for: the President of the United States reading his new book and talking about it. But will the book, and the talk, have any consequences? The President seemed doubtful. He pointed out that the top twenty-five hedge-fund managers made more money last year than all the kindergarten teachers in the country. In the closest he came to a policy proposal, he argued that the wealthiest Americans, such as those fund managers, should pay more than the present fifteen-per-cent tax rate on their gains, not “seventy per cent marginal rates which existed in the golden days that Bob’s talking about, when he was a kid. I’m talking about taxing them like it’s ordinary income, which means they might pay twenty-three, maybe twenty-five, per cent, which, by historical standards, postwar era, would still be really low.” He explained, “If we can’t ask from society’s lottery winners to just make that modest investment, then, really, this conversation is for show.”

It felt like a summation–the President exercising his prerogative to have the last word. But it also felt post-Presidential, as if Obama, stymied by Congress, has been forced prematurely out of the Oval Office and into a panelist’s chair. A.E.I.’s Arthur Brooks, operating from the playbook of the “free-enterprise movement,” swiftly changed the subject from taxes on the wealthy to middle-class entitlements. As Brooks parried with the President (hopscotching from point to point like Ira Glass’s market-fundamentalist brother, interrupting himself to work in laugh lines he’d come up with while the President was speaking), it seemed that the President of the United States may have done all he can about poverty.