Sasha Abramsky: Inside Obama's Brain

Introduction: Setting the Stage (p. 8):

Jerry Kellman, Obama's first and most influential mentor in the world of Chicago community organizing, always viewed the writings of management guru Peter Drucker as being as applicable to the world of organizing and of grassroots politics as to business. When he was training Obama, he oftentimes carried Drucker's books into their meetings. Drucker believed that successful modern corporations were horizontal organizations, with knowledge widely distributed throughout the workforce. It was a vision not too different from that the community organizers had of effective, democratic political structures. For Kellman, Drucker's words were revelations. "Who's your market? What's of value to them?" he would ask his young organizers. "Those are universal questions when you're trying to get a job done."

1. Focus (p. 25):

From the time he was very young, focus and the ability to filter out the surrounding white noise have been core facets of Barack Obama's personality. Perhaps it was a legacy of the middle-of-the-night English lessons his mother would make him sit through as a small boy in Indonesia. Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate. Friends from his days at the elite Punahou Academy, in Honolulu, recall that Barry, as he was then known, was always able to zoom in on individuals, to appear to give them his undivided attention. "He was very calm, very poised, a good listener as well as a good talker, Very eloquent," his homeroom teacher, Eric Kusunoki, known to the students simply as Mr. Kus, remembered. "He was bright, articulate, had a good demeanor, got along well with everyone." Mr. Kusunoki and students from Obama's class recollected a happy, laid-back teenager, but one who knew how to focus intensely when he had to.

(pp. 39-40):

Yet for all his emphasis on focus and accomplishment, Obama isn't a micromanager -- indeed, those close to him say he chooses top talent to surround him and then delegates well in the confidence that his team will present him with good information and policy choices. "The brilliance of his campaign is, he put together a small team of brilliant people, and then he got out of the way. I've seen a lot of campaigns," said Alan Solomont, the first big Bill Clinton financier to publicly back Obama. "And I've never seen a candidate who was less of a micromanager. He clearly was part of setting strategy. He said 'I want to run it like a business. I want it to show respect. And I want no drama.' He put together Axelrod and Plouffe, Gibbs and Hildebrand, and what have you, not a big group, and he really then let them run things. I've never seen a campaign where there weren't people coming and going. None of that in this campaign."

2. Looking Inward, Reaching Outward (pp. 45-46):

Obama was a half-black, half-white teenager, with a half-white, half-Asian sister living thousands of miles away with his mother among rural Javanese craftsmen, and an array of half siblings in Kenya whom he had never met. Some of his ancestors were Christians, some Muslim, others animists. He lived in a small apartment with his grandparents from Kansas, in a Hawaii mainly populated by whites, Japanese Americans, and indigenous Hawaiians.

Of all the states in the union, Hawaii, during the time Obama was being raised there, was the most polyglot. It was a majority nonwhite state; it was young enough to not be bedeviled by the same racial schisms that plagued the rest of the country in the 1960s and 1970s; and, thousands of miles from the mainland, it had developed a culture that, while identifiably American, was also quite distinct. Whether you were white or brown or black, if you lived on the islands, you were first and foremost a Hawaiian.

(pp. 51-52):

At Jeremiah Wright's church, Obama imbibed a version of Christianity that taught congregants to be proud of their racial and ethnic heritages, to be themselves rather than try to fit into personas molded by other cultures and individuals over the centuries. Before Wright became a liability for Obama, with politically incendiary sermons played endlessly on the nightly news during the spring of 2008, he was a messenger of hope for the young man. In Wright's version of Christianity, redemption wasn't something to be hoped for in the afterlife but was a living reality, a political aspiration to be worked toward here on earth. For a man with Obama's complex background and need for a grounded sense of identity, for a man who had spent his early adulthood in a continual quest for community, it was a compelling message. It was, in a way, a logical extension of the community organizing message he had himself been spreading since leaving Columbia University years earlier.

Later, his wife's family -- stable, middle-class, structured in a way that his own family had never been -- and then his and Michelle's two daughters, came to occupy the central role that community organizing had previously filled. He was determined that he would be a significant presence in his own children's lives in a way that his father had not been in his.

(pp. 53-54):

Barack Obama is, both by personality and as a strategic political choice, a conciliator, a community builder. Friends call him a pragmatic idealist, a radical moderate, or, sometimes, a moderate radical. He has ideals, but he has learned throughout his life that he needs to bring other people along with him if he is to achieve change. He has absorbed the lesson that success rarely comes to those too stubborn or rigid to acknowledge that many problems have more than one legitimate solution.

3. Sense of History (p. 63):

While Obama is fascinated by transformative leaders -- he is, says one of his close friends, partial to the Great Man theory of history, to the idea that strong, charismatic individuals can chart the direction countries and civilizations take -- it is the interplay of ideas and action that particularly intrigues him. Read Obama's writings and you are clearly reading the words of a man who loves grappling with social theories, but who also realizes the fragility both of ideas and of the social systems that rest upon them. Like most keen students of history, he understands the need for leaders to exhibit flexibility to meet changed circumstances.

(pp. 71-72):

For longtime activist and historian Harry Boyte, there was nothing accidental about all the majesty-of-labor imagery. It was, he believed, "a particular understanding of the American narrative. It is an interpretation of the American narrative that American society was built by ordinary people, by the labors of ordinary people, mostly unheralded, in a myriad of settings and ways. So in building towns and building communities and schools and festivals and libraries and public things -- the commonwealth -- as people developed and built the commonwealth, they became in a sense the commonwealth of citizens. So it's a strong work theme." It was, said Boyte, carefully redolent of Franklin Roosevelt, stressing, at a time when many millions were out of work, that ordinary workers constituted "the genius of America."

(p. 81):

The youth of President Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., straddled the end years of British colonial rule in Kenya. His story was inextricably intertwined with one system's collapse and another's messy birth. He was a technocrat educated at elite Western universities to play a role in governing newly independent Kenya; yet he was also a Luo tribesman on the wrong side of ugly internal divides within that new governing system. He was a sharply intelligent man ultimately brought low because of his unwillingness to compromise with figures he believed to be stupid or corrupt or both. In searching for his father 's legacy, Obama discovered the story of a man who spent long years in a form of domestic purgatory, barred from the top jobs his talents qualified him for, oftentimes reduced to conditions of humiliating poverty.

4. Self-Confidence: Obama's one failed political campaign was in 2000 when he ran for Congress against Rep. Bobby Rush, and lost by 30 points (p. 92):

The defeat was one of the low points of Obama's public life. But it was also a eureka moment. When the numbers were analyzed, the contours of the loss suggested two things: One, Obama was not a natural "black politician." In a race for black votes in a majority black district, he was vulnerable to the "outsider" charge. Two, among the white voters in the congressional district, Obama had emerged a favorite. He had, apparently, terrific crossover appeal, especially for female white voters.

5. Poise (p. 102):

At the time Obama was sworn in as U.S. President, one in ten U.S. Senators were graduates of Harvard Law School, as were five of the nine Supreme Court Justices. If they shared a single trait that transcended their ideological differences, it was a sense almost of noblesse oblige toward the American Constitution; its words and its sentiments were theirs to understand, to protect, and to nurture.

(p. 105):

Time and again during the long election campaign, that steely calm was on display for all to see. When Obama's team members started flipping out in the face of, say, unfavorable pol numbers or unfathomably bad economic data, he tended to remain calm, the still center at the eye of the storm. Organizer friends from the 1980s recollect the only sign he ever gave of being ruffled was smoking two Marlboros in a row instead of his usual single smoke. Those rare moments they termed "two-cigarette situations." Did they ever see a three-cigarette situation? Not once.

Case Study: Tackling Race Head-On: Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright. (pp. 115-116):

A year after this speech, that ability to cross racial lines allowed him to win election as president of the Harvard Law Review, beating out a field of eighteen other candidates. At a time of fairly pronounced racial tensions at Harvard -- African American students were campaigning for the university to hire more minority faculty, conservative white students, many sympathetic to the new formed Federalist Society, were mounting an intellectual assault on affirmative action, and tempers were flaring on all sides -- Obama won the support both of black students and also of whites. Many of his supporters were fairly conservative, but, largely because of his already-developed listening skills, they believed that Obama, despite his liberal beliefs, would serve as a conciliator. [ . . . ]

So successful was Obama in befriending his opponents, remembered professor David Wilkins, that, twenty years later, when Republican Party operatives tried to dig up dirt on his Law Review tenure, they couldn't find any. Even the people who didn't like his politics liked and trusted him as an individual and felt that he had run the Review in an honest and above-board manner. It was, felt Wilkins, "a very important early indication of his remarkable ability to bridge divides."

6. Curiosity (p. 125):

By all accounts, Obama's curiosity was nurtured in him by his mother, Stanley Ann. She was, he wrote in the 2004 preface to Dreams from My Father, defined by "her joy, her capacity for wonder."

When the family lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the late 1960s, Ann taught English. Unlike most of the expat kids, who were enrolled in an exclusive American school, Barry attended local schools. He learned Indonesian and was kept up to speed on his English by lessons taught him by his mother in the small hours of the mornings. Day by day, he came face to face with an unfamiliar culture, learning to eat exotic foods -- including, he writes in his memoirs, dog and snake -- listening to the Islamic call to morning prayers, seeing up close the disease and poverty of a developing nation. Wherever Ann went, the kids went; they were allowed, and even expected, to take part in the grown-up conversations. The children were, Maya recalled, raised "in a manner different from a lot of American kids."

(p. 130):

Obama's description of his euphoriant dabblings is surprisingly frank. Thus, unlike Bill Clinton, who everyone knew had smoked pot back in the 1960s but who jumped through hoops to implausibly deny that he had inhaled, Obama, when asked, said something to the effect of "of course I inhaled. That was the point." The honesty is practically endearing.

(pp. 138-139):

Over the next several years, Mikva played senior-statesman adviser to the young protégé Obama. They would talk about what worked and what didn't work in Bill Clinton's presidency, how a man with a personal life so publicly flawed could nevertheless excel electorally. They would analyze why Harry Truman, a man of modest education, so successfully rose to the challenge of rebuilding postwar Europe and setting in place the cornerstones of American Cold War strategy. They would discuss Lincoln's cabinet choices, his approach to slavery, his maneuverings to save the Union. Obama understood, Mikva felt, "that particularly in government, people play a role far beyond their particular accomplishments." History was not made simply by padding one's résumé. As so many others had found before him, Mikva determined Obama to be extremely good at understanding complicated ideas.

Obama understands the world to be dynamic, complex and ever changing, said one senior campaign adviser. "He didn't grow up with traditional frameworks. He is suspicious of dogma. It's his instinct to not start with some simplified construct or understanding of a problem."

7. Thinking Outside the Box (p. 146):

Obama, too, approaches problems without locked-in-place ideological preconceptions. That is reflected by his choice of advisers, by his desire to hear all sides of an argument, and by his willingness to embrace unorthodox solutions to the problems of the moment, whether that means negotiating an ownership stake for the United Auto Workers in the Chrysler car company as a way of funding retirees' health benefits or reevaluating the methods by which America has conducted its War on Drugs since the early 1970s.

(pp. 156-157):

In Chicago, Obama went into community organizing in part hoping to re-create in his own life the sense of idealism that had brought his parents together two decades earlier. Recently graduated from Columbia University, he started working what fellow-organizer and gang intervention expert Al Kindle termed "the mean streets of Chicago." Kindle and the older, more street-smart activists watched Obama's back, talked to gang members so they wouldn't hassle him when he went onto their turf to mobilize people around,s ay, asbestos removal from a public housing project, helped build bonds of trust with neighborhood residents. "While he was in Chicago, we tried as best we could to educate him on the intricacies of our community. We had relationships. We introduced him to those relationships. Some of those mothers of the community. We had worked with them through the campaigns of Harold Washington, the fights of the sixties. He was new to the community. But our trust in him allowed people to put their trust in him. He came from the perspective in which he was trying to help. He was a young guy, trying to get started, who had an interest in trying to get something done. We'd always pledged we would help any young African American who was willing to lead in a new direction. We were looking for new leadership -- to train and to promote."

(pp. 164-166):

He is instinctually a free trader, yet he clearly sympathizes with trade union critiques of NAFTA and the other trade agreements that largely shape America's role within the global economy. During the primary season, however, foreign policy adviser Samantha Powers, author of the book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, got caught telling Canadian officials that Obama's Critiques of NAFTA were unlikely to result in significant changes to the trade agreement. He is an opponent of the war in Iraq, yet during the presidential election campaign and in the first months of his presidency, showed himself to be something of a hawk on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He believes in multilateralism, yet recognizes America is the only country with a strong enough military to, for example, push for a just peace in the bloody conflict in Sudan's Darfur region or tackle piracy in the coastal waters off Somalia. He is willing to go outside his comfort zone, to venture into danger zones, in diplomacy, as witnessed by his much-debated statement during the election season that he would be prepared to meet with the leaders of countries such as Iran and North Korea to try to find common ground. John McCain taunted him for this, but the Democrat stood his ground. There was, he argued, no point in talking with only one's friends. On the other hand, during those same weeks, he carved out a far tougher line toward Pakistan than did the otherwise hawkish Bush administration or, for that matter, McCain. He has long favored universal health care, yet during the primary season, wary of alienating powerful lobbies such as the insurance industry, adopted a set of proposals more modest in their aims than those crafted by Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. He is a firm opponent of the notion that America has the right to torture terrorism-suspect detainees in certain circumstances; but in his first weeks in power, even as he prepared to release the infamous "torture memos" detailing how his predecessor's administration approved techniques such as waterboarding, his legal team accepted specific, extraordinary-case exemptions to the general rule that the limits imposed on interrogations by military manuals must always be adhered to by the CIA. [ . . . ]

Yet Obama has made clear on several occasions his willingness to stand up to the left-leaning blogs when the need arises. Indeed, in Mid-January 2009, as he prepared to assume the presidency, he convened a meeting not with liberal bloggers but with a coterie of conservative bloggers and commentators. The message was clear: Don't try to pin me down. Don't mistake me for being two-dimensional. Indeed, read Obama's campaign book Change We Can Believe In, and one can see that he faults Bush not so much for being a conservative as for being unable to change course in response to new situations. "These past eight years," he writes, "will be remembered for their rigid and ideological adherence to discredited ideas."

(pp. 169-170):

Throughout the presidential campaign, one adviser remembered, he kept urging his people to "think outside the box." Don't just think about immediate problems, he told his teams, but ask yourself what you want the United States to be in twenty-five years; then ask yourself what it will have to look like in ten years in order to reach that goal; then ask yourself what it ought to look like in five years. "He's a consummate educator," the adviser said. As a law school lecturer, he viewed the classroom as a place for intellectual give-and-take between students and lecturer; similarly, at a town hall meeting, rather than fall back on tired clichés and canned responses, he actually tried to think through the questions the audience asked to him. "He has," the adviser argued, "an eagerness to live in the moment and think in the moment" in such settings, a confidence in his ability to think on his feet. "He views politics as an educational enterprise. Everything in your life to some degree has the potential to teach you something. This is a keen observer of human nature."

8. The Smooth Politician (pp. 179-180):

On the floor of the Senate and in the hot seat during presidential debates, Obama brought into play many of the skills that he had learned at law school. Chief among these, thought Chris Edley, who had taught the candidate when he was at Harvard and later went on to become dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, was an ability to think as one's adversary would. "There are some things about legal training that I believe are particularly valuable in that line of work. The simplest of those is that we try to drill into our students the importance of thinking about the other side of the argument. A good litigator, for example, knows that in order to prepare your case you have to think about what the best arguments that the other side has, so you can anticipate those, think about the counterarguments, think three moves ahead. That produces a habit of mind in which you are always testing assertions from multiple angles to see whether they hold up under tough scrutiny. So that's obviously helpful when you're trying to make a difficult political and policy judgment." It was, in many ways, like learning to play chess. The result of such a habit, Edley believed, was a "balanced, dispassionate, analytical approach," one that stood in stark contrast to the "chaotic, mud-wrestling style of policy debate" that too often passed for leadership in modern-day America.

(pp. 191-192):

While Obama received solid marks from liberal groups for his voting record in the U.S. Senate -- despite his caution in sponsoring bills that could be labeled in some way "radical," the National Journal went so far as to rank him the most liberal senator in 2007" -- he wasn't averse to ditching pledges popular with liberals and alienating left-leaning constituents when it seemed pragmatic to do so. Witness his promise, early in the presidential campaign, to restrict his fund-raising in order to run a race paid for by public funds -- long a clarion call for progressives interested in reforming the electoral system. Once it became clear that his candidacy could out-fund-raise any and all opponents, however, th epledge was quietly put on one side and private funds, to the tune of many hundreds of millions of dollars, began pouring in to the Obama campaign.

Case Study: The Iowa Caucus

9. The Inspirer (p. 216):

Opinion polls from early in Obama's presidency showed a public both deeply enamored of their new leader -- a New York Times poll from inauguration week put his favorability rating at well over 60 percent -- and also willing to grant him years to turn the poor economy around. While solid majorities during the last years of the bush administration felt the country was heading in the wrong direction, equally solid majorities in early 2009 believed Obama had the capacity to get the country back on its feet again.

Case Study: Team of Rivals Redux (p. 225):

President Kennedy's aide Richard Donohue compared Obama's brain trust to his onetime boss's fabled Camelot administration -- except, he believed, Obama's team was more talented, and Obama perhaps a better foil to their strong egos. JFK had a sharp tongue, which he wasn't afraid to use to cut down or intimidate people he disagreed with. Obama, by contrast, didn't use humor to demean his opponents. JFK, a child of privilege, could be extremely catty toward men he loathed, such as General Curtis LeMay, dismissing them from his presence and then cruelly bad-mouthing them before those colleagues who remained. Obama always took care to show respect even to those he disagreed with. He might go after their ideas aggressively, but he would never go after them as individuals.

10. The Leader (pp. 233-234):

When Obama returned to Chicago, in 1991, with a Harvard law degree in hand, he met with his old colleagues at the Developing Communities Project. John Owens, who had taken charge of the organization three years earlier, remembers that Obama made it clear that he no longer wanted to be seen as a community organizer. He was, he told Owens, ready to be a leader; he wanted to give speeches and put his own name and fact in the spotlight. It wasn't a statement uttered in arrogance, Owens felt, merely a matter-of-fact notice of intent. Obama had come to realize he shone when that spotlight homed in on him -- in truth, he'd always had an inkling of this, at least sine the day when he picked up a bullhorn and addressed a group of antiapartheid protestors at Occidental College in the early 1980s, luxuriating in the enthusiastic crowd response his words generated -- and he wanted to craft for himself a career in politics.

(pp. 239-242):

America's forty-fourth president assumed office with the economy in free fall and America's international reputation in tatters. Within minutes of his being sworn in and giving his inauguration speech, in front of an estimated two million people thronging the Washington Mall -- others on the podium with Obama that day recall that the waves of sound reverberating back from the crowd were like nothing they had ever heard before -- President Obama was already signing cabinet nomination papers and a proclamation declaring a national day of renewal and reconciliation. Shortly after lunch he was back at work, instructing military prosecutors to temporarily halt legal proceedings involving Guantánamo Bay detainees and issuing orders to government agencies to put a hold on last-minute regulations signed by outgoing president Bush. Perhaps he was recalling words he had uttered twenty-seven months earlier, at an event in Boston's Kennedy Library and Museum. If you run for the presidency, he told the audience, you make a bargain with voters: trust me with ultimate power, and in exchange I will be prepared to give my life to the job, to put aside all fear, doubt and insecurity, to acknowledge there will be no time "for sleep, family life, vacations, leisure."

During the days and weeks ahead, the pace didn't slow down. After just over a month in office, he had signed into law the most ambitious fiscal stimulus package since the 1930s -- a legislative triumph in pursuit of which the new president had barnstormed the country for nearly a week, urging passage -- as well as a huge package of aid to home owners at risk of going into foreclosure. His budget envisaged spending hundreds of billions of dollars on moving the country toward health care for all. He had ordered the gradual shutdown of the Guantánamo prison, in Cuba, reapplied the Geneva Conventions to the treatment of terrorism suspects, and ordered a review of the legal status of the men held without trial during the war on terror. He had revamped America's approach to tackling global warming and had charted a new course regarding discussions with Russia on reducing the two countries' nuclear weapons arsenals. He had ordered a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and an increased number of troops to be deployed to Afghanistan. Obama had also signed orders creating a White House office of urban affairs, opening government decision making to greater public scrutiny and overturning time limits on a woman's ability to sue her employer for workplace pay discrimination.

All told, it was a stunning turn away from the policies and priorities of the Bush administration. And it demonstrated an agenda of extraordinarily ambitious, all-encompassing scope. The huge ship of state was being wrestled onto a new course, was being deliberately turned away from thirty years of neoconservative economics and social policy. As the stock market fell, as unemployment, homelessness, and hunger rose, so the role of government in stepping in to ameliorate the hardship caused by failing markets became more crucial; and far from being intimidated by this prospect, President Obama gave every appearance of relishing the opportunity to transform America. After all, as his adviser Rahm Emmanuel was often heard saying, "Why waste a good crisis?"

Ted Sorensen, who had closely observed every administration since that of John Kennedy, was impressed. He believed that Obama had all the qualities of a great president. "A good leader," Kennedy's most faithful adviser opined, "has a lot of followers. He has to have the qualities that attract and hold and motivate those followers. It's not just the speeches; but he's got to get people to tune in and listen to the speeches. Then when they listen to them, they've got to agree with them. Then when they agree with them, they've got to act on them. That's what a leader does. That's what Kennedy did and that's What Obama, I think, will do."

A year later he doesn't seem like much of a leader, in part because he's lost many of his followers, more so because so many of the things he tried to do off the bat turned out to be inadequate.

Conclusion: A New Morning (p. 251):

As he navigated the long road to power, Barack Obama fashioned himself as being something and someone new, both a healer and a listener. In telling his own extraordinary life story, he became a repository for all the millions of pent-up stories, all the dreams and vaguely articulated expectations, of his vast audiences. In the years since he had shot to stardom in the wake of his July 2004 speech before the Democratic Party's convention, he had emerged as a one-man embodiment of a revivified American Dream.