By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 6, 2008
There are a lot of reasons why a guy with the improbable name of Barack Hussein Obama just won the presidency of the United States -- such as Wall Street's meltdown, a wildly unpopular president and an opponent so in love with his own maverick image that he picked Annie Oakley as his running mate. But one reason became obvious only over the past six weeks: his temperament.
President-elect Obama has a temperament so even, so balanced, so cool, you couldn't faze it with a flamethrower.
Even in his victory speech at Grant Park on Tuesday night, at the end of an exhausting campaign, he kept things steady, on script. He never exulted, and showed few flashes of anything like the joy that saturated his audience. His speech was sober, serious and sweeping, commensurate with the historic nature of a black man being elected to lead a nation built with slave labor.
Obama over the past two years proved himself an ironman, someone who knows that half the battle is showing up every day. He had spectacular moments, but he also showed an uncanny knack for avoiding mistakes. Like a great golfer, he knew how to grind out the pars. His opponents sneered that Obama has no experience, that he's never been in charge of anything, but by the end of this campaign he didn't look green at all. He seemed fully in command of his campaign and his own emotions. He even visibly aged before our eyes, with more gray in his hair.
He was never excitable, and he eventually made that trait part of his pitch. Listen to what he said on "Monday Night Football" on the eve of the election:
"I don't get too high when things are going well and I don't get too low when things are going tough."
Temperament: Who knew it could be a secret weapon?
* * *
Obama's final rally took place late Monday night in Manassas. Something like 90,000 people filled a swale of the Prince William County Fairgrounds, packed under bright lights, framed by oaks and maples in their autumn glory. Obama delivered his standard stump speech, showing little sign of fatigue, never succumbing to the urge to phone it in. In the darkness, back near the traveling press corps, stood campaign strategist David Axelrod, the architect of a historic victory.
"One of the things I told him in the beginning: Presidential candidacies are like MRIs for your character. You can't hide anything," Axelrod said.
Does Obama ever lose his temper?
"Everybody loses their temper, but I've never seen him lose his control," Axelrod answered. "I've never heard him scream in rage. He's got a great facility for turning anger into something constructive."
During the campaign, pundits ventured that Obama had to navigate around the stereotype of the Angry Black Man. But Obama may have single-handedly vanquished that stale stereotype forever.
And so it was temperament that came to the fore rather than race. For most of the past year, any discussion of presidential temperament tended to center on McCain and his reputation for flying into profane rages. Obama himself dropped the T-word on McCain during Obama's acceptance speech in late August at the Democratic National Convention: "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next commander in chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have."
Webster's New World College Dictionary defines "temperament" as "one's customary frame of mind or natural disposition."
"Temperament" can be easily tweaked to be a pejorative: "temperamental" means excitable and erratic.
Obama never appears temperamental. But the cool demeanor hasn't always been an asset. Back in the primary season he sometimes could seem too aloof, too professorial, too cerebral (remember that in politics, words like "professorial" and "cerebral" are supposed to make us leap back in horror).
Obama could even be dull. Go back to the spring of 2007, when it seemed like everyone in the U.S. Senate was running for president. The international firefighters union had a big gig in Washington, a cattle call for presidential candidates. Obama said all his usual, earnest stuff, and pretty much bombed. Obama was "flat," the press corps decided.
This is something that rarely got mentioned in the sanctioned narrative of the Obama campaign: He had some off nights. He didn't have a supernatural ability to dazzle an audience. His greatest speeches were usually synergistic, with his supporters creating the atmosphere where his words could sparkle. If Obama made the crowds, the crowds also made Obama.
There's one chronic problem with being so self-controlled, and that is that it can make a person hard to read. The audience can hunger for more emotion, more signs of the human inside the suit. Obama has, in fact, been extremely revealing of his thoughts and emotions in his memoirs, particularly his first, "Dreams From My Father," but as a presidential candidate he's stuck to his unrevealing script.
Journalists have been frustrated. From the campaign plane they complained that he's hard to get to know. On election eve, John Dickerson wrote in Slate: "It's hard to guess at a candidate's inner feelings. It is particularly hard with Obama, whose emotions are as carefully constrained as a bonsai tree and who keeps the press at a chilly distance."
But Obama didn't need to make journalists love him. He needed to make swing voters comfortable with him. Consider two commercials, one for McCain, one for Obama, that got heavy rotation in Pennsylvania and Virginia in the final days of the campaign.
The first, produced by a group called the National Republican Trust, showed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fulminating. "For 20 years, Barack Obama followed a preacher of hate," the ad said. It concluded: "Barack Obama. Too Radical. Too Risky."
When that ad aired during "Monday Night Football," it was immediately followed by an ad for Obama. The candidate stared into the camera and said, "John McCain wants to scare you. I want you to know what I believe. I believe in the dignity of work. I believe in tax cuts for the middle class. I believe people who break the law should be punished, and the terrorists who fought against us should be hunted down before they strike."
He was telling the American people that he didn't have horns and a serpent's tail. He all but endorsed apple pie. For an exotic candidate, being a little dull is a brilliant strategy.
* * *
The New York Observer recently ran a cover story with an illustration of Obama as Spock, the science officer of "Star Trek's" spaceship Enterprise. This worked in part because Obama can appear to have a Vulcan-like reserve, and because it let McCain be the excitable Capt. Kirk. On the TV show, Kirk was always trying to save an imperiled planet, and being rather red-faced and melodramatic about it. So, too, with McCain, beaming himself back to Washington to save the nation from credit default swaps.
But maybe the better analogy is between Obama and Batman. A few weeks ago a YouTube clip of the old 1960s "Batman" TV show went viral. It was titled "Batman vs. The Penguin: The Debate." The clip shows Adam West's Batman squaring off against Burgess Meredith's Penguin.
The Penguin vows not to sling mud. (Then he points out that Batman is always seen hanging around with criminals.) Adam West doesn't flinch; he plays the Caped Crusader as a man who need never raise his voice above a whisper. He is Obama-cool.
But wait: Maybe Obama is the Road Runner, and McCain the coyote, as has been suggested by the blogger Andrew Sullivan. There was something coyote-like in the way that McCain's schemes to defeat his rival often backfired. Sarah Palin, in this formulation, was an Acme missile that malfunctioned and returned to blow up Wile E. McCain.
The Road Runner, meanwhile, remains unflappable. He's got the right temperament for what he needs to do.
Which is move on. Keep running.
Beep beep.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.