chapter FIFTEEN

A Structural Dynamics Analysis of Barack Obama

Immediately after the 2008 presidential election, journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin interviewed scores of campaign participants from both major parties, collecting their first-person, behind-the-scenes accounts of the performance of the candidates’ teams in the primary and general campaigns. Their 2010 book, Game Change, captured the workings (sometimes spectacular, sometimes awful) inside the leadership teams of contenders Clinton, Obama, Edwards, McCain, and others. In doing so, it illustrated the main concern of this book: the grim extent to which a high-stakes leader’s success or failure hangs on his or her skills in creating and leading not far-flung networks of supporters but his or her own close, face-to-face team. Along the way, Game Change rawly displays a second major theme of Reading the Room: that, for better and worse, the personal lives of people on teams will either promote or hamper effective work within the team. By personal lives I mean team members’ histories and the nature and quality of their relationships with spouses, lovers, family, and closest companions outside work.

The same cultural shift of the 1960s that enlarged leaders’ possibilities beyond the John Wayne stereotype and ushered women into widespread leadership in the workplace also profoundly changed our premises about leadership in politics. Politics is about competing ideologies, and its traditional focus has been power, but politics is also “the art of the possible,” with reasoning and compromise as necessary secondary resorts for “getting something done” and “getting my bill passed.” Yet because ideologies and willingness to follow a champion are both heavily imbued with passion, politics is also fundamentally influenced by the same structural dynamics themes of love that Chapter Fourteen reemphasized in the world of business.

Fifteen years different in age, but both having “grown up” in and since the 1960s, Presidents Clinton and Obama have been changing the nature and possibilities of the office in line with that cultural shift, and there is reason to expect that other presidents to come will continue along their lines. One of many aspects of the change is that the spouses of presidents are now able to play very different roles in their tenure at the White House than most chose or were able to play in the past, and U.S. citizens want to and feel entitled to know far more about the private lives of presidents than they ever did in the past. As Sonia Waterman is altering the terms and resources of Ralph Waterman’s role as CEO, so Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama have altered and continue to alter their spouses’ political lives (as Bill also does Hillary’s).

This chapter shows how structural dynamics thinking can illuminate our understanding of political leaders in general and help us speculate usefully about what they are likely to do in office. The chapter also provides some speculations about Obama’s growing edge and future.

I read Obama as a remarkable figure in numerous ways, only one of which is his being the first African American to occupy the White House. For example, he is one of those rare leaders who, without a coach like Duncan Travis, set out consci­ously to build his own theory and practice model for how he would act as a leader.

This chapter describes Obama’s behavioral profile, his formative stories, his quest for identity, and his ultimate settling on a moral mode and hero type. It explores his past and likely future behaviors under high-stakes conditions.

In the past it has always been difficult for those outside an administration to fathom a president’s political actions, and inevitably the later parts of this chapter will speculate. But in Obama’s case we have unusual resources, beginning with his own extensive writings and Game Change. As I proceed, I’ll mention other sources that have allowed perhaps a more candid and complete view of a president still in office than has been possible before.

OBAMA’S BEHAVIORAL PROFILE

In low-stakes settings, structural dynamics would describe Obama as a bystander in open meaning.

Obama the Bystander

Obama’s dominant mode is that of mover from the bystander stance. He is a classically strong bystander who takes information in, internally assesses what he experiences, and interprets before taking overt action; in other words, he chooses to remain silent before making a statement that either adds perspective or bridges other actors. The action he takes can be a move of his own, a follow to a previous action, or an oppose to a previous action, but in a neutral voice. Obama is skillful in this strategy, and the bystander stance gives him a greater range than classically strong movers, followers, and opposers.

Obama’s status as a bystander likely stems from a childhood that defined him as a citizen of the world rather than as a citizen of a homogeneous community. Born of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya; growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii, and raised by white grandparents; being a black man who, by circumstance if not by choice, found himself always on the outside looking in—all of these factors probably contributed to his tendencies to play the bystander.

In his now famous speech on race on March 18, 2009, Obama demonstrated his fluency as an interpreter. Being a good bystander, like being a good interpreter, requires fluency in more than one language. “As a biracial person,” according to Cassandra Butts, a fellow law student at Harvard, “[Obama] … has had to come to an understanding of the two worlds he’s lived in. … Living in those worlds, he functions as an interpreter to others. He has seen people in both worlds at their most intimate moments, when their humanity and imperfections shone through. His role is as an interpreter, in explaining one side to the other.” At Harvard, “[almost] from the start, Obama attracted attention … for the confidence of his bearing and his way of absorbing and synthesizing the arguments of others in a way that made even the most strident opponent feel understood.”¹

Obama has great skill in bridging people who speak the different structural dynamics languages of affect, power, and meaning.

Obama’s Language Preference of Meaning

Obama certainly prefers the domain of meaning. What led him to it? For one thing, his grandparents and mother (and stories about his absent father) instilled in him a strong faith in the value of ideas. Obama was clearly inspired by his father’s Harvard pedigree, going so far as to reference him directly in his autobiography. Obama’s mother, according to David Remnick’s The Bridge, would wake him at 4:30 in the morning to tutor him. Furthermore, Obama’s time at the elite institutions he attended—Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School—unquestionably shaped the special value he places on meaning.

Obama’s career choices also reflect a preference for meaning. He writes of his first postcollege job, at Business International Corporation, that although his time there was comfortable and perhaps the start of a profitable career in business (power) befitting his academic pedigree, he derived little sense of meaning out of this job. He then left to do community organizing in Chicago; after a number of years, he realized that his education must continue if he wanted to make a true difference, and headed off to Harvard Law.²

In a little understood nuance, Obama also speaks well at the interface of meaning and power (what I call meaning as power). His well-known ability to absorb, digest, and analyze large amounts of complex information and then to display his understanding in words both spoken and written takes the communicative act of meaning as power to new heights. By infusing power with meaning, he artfully connects with a skeptical audience hungry for leadership.

In making connection with others, Obama also infuses meaning with affect (meaning as affect). Excepting occasional moments, as in his Tucson speech on January 12, 2011 after the shooting of Rep. Giffords, he is not known for the expression of feelings in public, apart from passion for his cause of change. He does not connect, as former president Bill Clinton is capable of doing, on an emotional level. But he does connect through the affect-meaning blend of empathy. In other words, whereas Clinton expresses emotions, Obama conveys that he understands the feelings and thoughts of others.

No one would expect to hear Obama echo anything like Clinton’s famous “I feel your pain.” When people find themselves in a room with Clinton, they feel embraced, their feelings not only recognized but felt by him. In a room with Obama, they feel understood, known. This may account for his ability to bridge people of different persuasions. Other observers note Obama’s distinctive proneness to empathy. Kloppenberg, for example, says, “Obama himself saw empathy as an essential piece of organizing. He wanted to know what made people tick.”³

Similarly, here’s how Kenneth W. Mack, Obama’s colleague on the Harvard Law Review, saw Obama: “Barack Obama was catapulted into national prominence, in part, because of his skill at building bonds of empathy with supporters from a seemingly impossibly broad political base. Conservatives marveled at his use of language and metaphors that resonated with their core beliefs. Liberals and progressives believed that [his] rise to prominence … represented a triumph for their own core agenda. People of a wide variety of viewpoints saw something of themselves in Barack.”⁴

That Obama is an instinctive maker of empathic meaning is also evident in what follows from his autobiography. Leaving the company of colleagues late one night, he sensed danger. Four black youths, who, given the time and place, could only be up to no good, were looking him over, as prey perhaps. This excerpt from his story captures a depth of knowing, of empathy, that is difficult to match: these boys, he muses, have no “margin for error.” They face “a truth … that has forced them, or others like them, eventually to shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt” (emphasis mine). He goes on to speculate, more as an empathic philosopher than as a community organizer cum lawyer, that “these boys will have to search long and hard for … any order that includes them as more than objects of fear or derision.”⁵

Obama’s Preference for Open Systems

Obama is a clear proponent—in principle, policy, behavior, and speech—of the open system, which, on one hand, encourages its members to express their different views even in the extreme (positive loop), but when all voices are heard, on the other hand, requires that they reach some agreement, even if it is provisional, by consensus (negative loop).

Obama’s culturally sensitive mother, an anthropologist, and his uniquely adaptive, racially tolerant, affectionately “underbearing” grandparents seem to have succeeded in cultivating in him a tolerance for difference, a core human value that the open system uses, through a balancing of positive and negative feedback loops, to regulate the boundaries of the system and, within those boundaries, the behaviors, including speech behaviors, of its members.

His open-system preferences are reflected in every context in which both Obama and others have tried to describe and explain him: his gregarious bearing, his pluralistic perspectives, his stances, his commitment to debate and compromise on fanatically defended issues, and the ways in which he tends to handle others, even those whose positions conflict with his own.

Remnick’s book offers evidence from various informants: “His talent, that habit of mind, was … evident in his openness in engaging people with whom he disagrees … You come to the problem [of complexity] with your own compass, your opinions and principles, but you have to be open. That was Barack.”⁶

Bipartisanship in politics goes hand in hand with open systems. Obama’s proclivities for this system and worldview can be seen early when, as newly elected president of the Harvard Law Review, he had to assemble his editorial team, a process “made more complicated by ego, politics, and race. Obama could have loaded the masthead with liberals and African-Americans. Instead he followed the traditional system of selection, and the result was that three of the four editors were conservative.”⁷

Further evidence of Obama’s predilection for the open system, with its firm commitment both to the uninhibited expression of individual differences and the rule that these must be settled in consensus, is his reliance on bipartisan debate that is expected to result in compromise. I will argue later in this chapter that this expectation is a feature of his practice model, and that this in turn is guided by a theory of practice (Chapter Thirteen)—deliberative, or participatory, democracy, to which he was exposed at Harvard Law. Whether his model, as evidenced in a stubborn call for bipartisan debate on vital issues, has or can succeed in the viciously polarized Congress he encountered in his first term remains to be seen.

OBAMA’S FORMATIVE STORIES

Obama’s gripping formative stories have already been told by the man himself in Dreams from My Father (2005) and by three marksman interpreters: David Remnick (The Bridge, 2010), Jonathan Alter (The Promise, 2010), and James Kloppenberg (Reading Obama, 2010).

I begin here with my own attempt to capture Obama’s childhood story in the style he himself might have felt and rehearsed in early years. The voice I use to tell his and other stories is deliberately fantasmagoric. I do this to capture what is in the room when adults reexperience the felt dramas of childhood deprivation. Here I tell it as if Obama were in the room with me.

Childhood Story

Obama’s childhood story is that of a boy determined to find his “roots.”

•  •  •

Wanting more sleep, the boy strains, pressing tight his still tired eyes, his dream starting to slip away, his mind trying to hold it back. He calls out. Wait! Who are you? he asks the mysterious, fast-fading dream figure. But it is too late. It is gone. Where do dreams go? he wonders. Where do they come from?

Come, come, my love, rise up. We’ve much work to do. It is his mother, barely visible in the predawn darkness. Awake now, but not happy about it, he asks, Can one’s mind write its own dreams? I mean writing them to order—not just any dream, but a mind-shaped dream? Ann sighs; she’s been here before. Do not woo me with your clever philosophical distractions. We can talk about such things when you’ve learned the basics, and you’ve got miles to go. Hup to; I’ll get the books. Like most children too quick to judgment over small slights ballooned large, he thinks, She doesn’t love me, then wishes he could erase the thought from his mind.

I’m tired too, he thinks he hears her mumble, which makes him feel even worse. He’s willed himself to bury the kinds of thoughts he has begun having lately about his mother. I’m like her luggage, packed and ready for another of her dreamy adventures. Or The world isn’t as she imagines it to be. Or I see things about my father she doesn’t see. Or She’s my teacher, my “moral muse” [a term he’s read somewhere], but I know things she doesn’t know, about being black.

His being black is, for his mother, almost a source of pride, something she can show off to the world. But it isn’t so easy for him: I am different from other kids at school. You kiss my head, smell it lovingly, caress my hair lovingly. They look at me strangely. When Sasha, a girl at school, asked if she could touch it, I wanted to hide. You want me to be as proud as you are about my black father, of my own blackness. I am confused now, but I will figure all this out. I will.

One day his mother blushes with excitement: Your father is coming to visit. Barry thinks, At last the mystery of who he is, and therefore who I am, will be solved. He resists the urge to ask her if his father the prince has become a king. Instead he waits, fired by anticipation.

From the day of his father’s arrival, his boy world is turned upside down. This is no king; this is not even a prince. He is but a man, and not much of a man. Barry watches, as is his way, his anticipation reduced to embers. As he watches, a small war unfolds over territory, between a weakened, naked would-be king and Barry’s grandparents. It seems that the war forces his mother to take sides over Barry in a territory of love or of control—he can’t tell which. Afterward he tells himself, When my father left, I did not feel loved; I felt lost, lost in a dark jungle, a tangle of confusion. A basketball, a gift from his father, the one sure comfort. (See Figure 15.1.)

Come away with me, his mother says, to my new country, my new home, where there are cultural riches beyond imagination … Barry looks at his mother, mutely, tuning it out. Like his father, she now seems smaller. Or in some strange way, he has magically grown taller. Looking “down” at her for the first time, he feels ashamed, not of her, but of what he sees: My beloved mother—tutor, muse, protector—is simply an innocent; yes, the most just and tolerant person he has ever known is no more than that. Trying to sweep away such tainted thoughts, he finally speaks: No, this is my home, a place where the ground does not move under my feet. But to himself he says, I am homeless. My father’s home is Africa; my mother’s home is Asia. But I am rootless.

Post-Childhood Stories in Search of an Adult Identity

In Obama’s early adolescence, his search for adult identity began at the privileged Punahou School in Hawaii, with critical stops at Occidental College in California, Columbia University in New York, and Chicago’s black communities and churches. After an important interlude at Harvard Law School and following study there, he ended his search with his return to Chicago to teach at the university, to establish his black roots in community service, and ultimately to rise rapidly in the political sphere.

Harvard Law opened windows of opportunity, decision, and choice. From the start, he was a star among both students and faculty as his intellectual prowess bloomed. Election as president of the law review earned him a contract to tell his story in Dreams. Connecting in unique style, he impressed and formed close, sometimes all but equal relationships with faculty.

Obama’s African American origins were a major issue for him in his search for identity throughout his adolescence and early adulthood. In their search for a kind of hero to serve as a model for heroic behavior in hard times, black youth face a compound question: not just Who am I? but Who am I as a black person? And then, What kind of hero meets my standards and matches my heroic inclinations?

Obama had to come to terms with his racial identity and, like so many black youth, a father who abandoned him. Further, he was primed for confusion by a white mother who idealized blackness and her African husband, thereby inadvertently denying her son’s right to ordinary feelings of loss and anger. At the same time, her love and that of his almost “color-blind” white grandparents were another factor in his confusion and intense search, and certainly a major factor in the astonishing success of that search.

From his early years, Obama seemed to know that he’d have to settle a psychological score with his father. His image of his father—an image made more powerful by geographical and cultural distance—was magnetically attractive. “Not knowing” him made him evocatively elusive. It follows that if Obama were to find himself, he’d have to find his father and bury the image.

Perhaps the following captures something of the hero story Obama was inwardly working out. One might call it “Yes I can.”

•  •  •

My father, a great man I was told, won my mother’s heart, gathered her in his strong arms, and entered her, leaving his seed both in her heart and in her soul, and then left. I was the seed he left behind. When he came a second time, he left his shadowed mark on me, but left before I got to know him. He remains a mystery I must solve.

When he came to America to fill his head with new knowledge, he won great acclaim. The keepers of that knowledge opened their vaults, filling his mind with what he needed to make his country strong like him.

My mother wept but shed no tears. You have his name, she said. His race is your race; you must honor both. She did not say this in so many words, but in the stories she told me to keep his memory alive. You must grow your mind so that he will be proud of you. He is black, and you are black. Be proud of that. Do not be angry at him for turning his back; he does what he must do; that is what makes him what he is.

Influenced by her stories, I wasn’t angry at my father for leaving us, but I was confused. I tried to believe, to trust, but still, in my secret heart, I wondered, Who am I? What does it mean to be black? Later, I would experiment, find out. For now, I would just keep an eye on things, think for myself, wait and see. As for my mother’s leaving me with strangers I hardly knew, I told myself she was making me strong enough to go it alone. And when I found myself, and when I was really loved, I would give something important to the world.

•  •  •

Before leaving Harvard, Obama made a crucial decision to go to Kenya to learn who his father really was and to connect with his African family. After Harvard and a short stint in corporate law, he famously chose community organizing as a first step toward a “larger purpose.” As a uniquely equipped African American, he was determined to serve both his race and his country. Harvard confirmed what America’s purer purposes were about. The country’s blemished history on racial policy focused his future on doing something about it.

Ongoing Triggering Themes

Chapter Six established the relationship between the childhood story and the behavior-triggering themes it gives birth to. As I suggested earlier, Obama’s stories reveal a strong sense of abandonment by both his parents, along with its tepid cousin, the sense of being alone. Another theme, need to belong, is a psychological roommate to abandonment, and Obama did set out to search for community, in Chicago’s streets and in church, and then for family, at Michelle’s behest.

Abandonment always leaves psychological traces; but though his mother “left him behind” to pursue her life and career without him, his stories show little or no direct anger toward her (though he may have shown it indirectly by his downgrading of her). This absence of anger is notable in recent behaviors as well and seems unnatural to him, though it is consistent with his general behavioral profile. For example, when Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) shouted “You lie!” during Obama’s first inaugural address, he kept his cool, and did so again when criticized by the media for not being more forceful, for not entering the ring to take his naysayer adversaries to the mat. Perhaps one could find an answer to this in his behavioral profile (bystander in open meaning), which lends itself to restraint.

Every human has a dark side, and it is safe to say that Obama is not exempt. But although his anger is mentioned from time to time, nowhere do we find extremes, such as rage, ugly threats, or verbal assaults on the character of others. In pursuit of his dark side, one could speculate that, in light of his avowed higher purpose of addressing black grievances, he consciously suppresses extreme anger to avoid being viewed as an “angry black man.” In addition, one could look to his childhood story and to his ambivalent relationship with his father, who was, in a sense, let off the hook. Arguably, Obama should be angry at a father who so thoroughly abandoned him. I take up the absence of anger as a shadow of this relationship later in this chapter.

Another, even more speculative dark-side element—which structural dynamics suggests Michelle would be most likely to experience—is that, in some form or other, he may psychologically abandon those he loves (Chapter Nine).

OBAMA’S IDENTITY QUEST

Like all of us, Obama arrived at his postures of moral justice and his heroic type through self-selected stories that I will follow along with in describing four paths he took in reaching his overall identity as a hero leader with a cause larger than himself.

• Finding his racial identity
• Establishing a theory of justice in which to frame his cause
• Cultivating his scholarly bent
• Forming his models of practice

Finding His Racial Identity

Much has been said on this subject by Obama and others. I wish only to call attention to those aspects that follow his trail out of confusion toward his ultimate role as leader.

At various points along the way—Punahou, Columbia and Harlem, Chicago, Harvard, Chicago again, Kenya, and in the presence of Michelle and family—Obama engaged in several activities typical of someone with his profile. He singled out people to talk to about race; he observed, as bystanders are prone to do; and he reflected on what he observed, alone and with others. Overlapping with these attempts to find meaning in discourse, he made a move in line with the bystander’s tendency to observe and reflect before acting.

Becoming a community organizer was a move to discover himself by getting to know inner-city African Americans in their often neglected urban environment, and was typical of Obama’s behavioral profile. Also crucial to his identity journey, as I will describe, he took active notice of a long list of heroic black figures, models from whom to pick and choose those who best fit his own emerging tendencies.

Two further decisions brought closure to his identity search. One was dis­covering and choosing a mate who would love him for who he was, including his heroic self.

Michelle Robinson—smarter than he, some say, a Harvard-trained lawyer as determined as he was to commit to some larger cause, less smitten than most with predictions that he would be the first black president, and thus able to rein in his alleged arrogance—got him all he needed in a mate and, more, the family he yearned for.

The second decision was to write the final chapter of his two formative stories by tracking his real father, putting the myth in perspective, and proving himself a match for both.

What we see now is a man who has chosen public service over the seductions of a corporate career sure to hand him the usual rewards; a man distinct for his instinct to create a life worth living, to use our terms; a self-directed man who, far sooner than most who do it all, took the path of responsible self-evolution, also our terms. In our framework, he’s left only one stone unturned in his childhood story: his mother. Recall that with a coach’s help, Ralph Waterman revisited the view he had of his mother. Obama may someday want to do the same.

Establishing a Theory of Justice in Which to Frame His Cause

It is rare for leaders in the corporate world to conscientiously build a model, and probably as rare among politicians. But my “reading” of Obama suggests that this is what he began to do during his time at Columbia. Recall our meta-model (Chapter Twelve), which says that a model requires three theories: of the thing, of change, and of practice. Although Obama himself has not publicly mentioned John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) as an influence, I suspect it is a source of his theory of the thing. Kloppenberg reports that Rawls’s arguments played a decisive role in debates about justice when Obama was studying political science at Columbia and law at Harvard, and when he was teaching at the University of Chicago. In brief, Rawls’s book argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality, based on principles of justice, and Obama’s speeches reflect these ideas when he talks about justice as fairness and about the role of justice in social cooperation.

Cultivating His Scholarly Bent

Obama refers to the period of transferring from Occidental to Columbia as his “ascetic” phase. Living deliberately “like a monk” in a sparse Harlem apartment, he began to write, journal, and read as if starving to know (see Figure 15.2).

Obama’s identity as a scholar took shape in the course of a dazzling amount of subsequent reading, including William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adam Smith, Ralph Ellison, John Dewey, Franz Fanon, Saul Alinsky, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Tribe, Malcolm X, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frederick Arthur, John Rawls, and others.

Framing His Models of Practice

I believe that between Chicago’s streets and Ivy libraries, Obama has mindfully crafted a practice model without actually naming it as such. My hunch is that his theory and model of practice come from two sources: deliberative democracy and the work of Saul Alinsky.

Deliberative democracy is a turn that democratic theory took in the later twentieth century. It is a system of political decision making that relies on popular consultation to make policy, very similar to the kind of decision making that takes place in high-level executive teams. Both emphasize the importance of the process of discussion. It is this discourse that gives validity to decisions, even though the populace does not necessarily make the actual decision. In theories of deliberative democracy, within the moral framework of society, citizens “must reason beyond their narrow-self interest and consider what can be justified to people who reasonably disagree with them.”⁸

At Harvard, Obama immersed himself in fine-point theoretical discussions on the subject. According to Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama, “What we need, [Obama] suggests, is a ‘shift in metaphors,’ a willingness to see ‘our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had’ … [the Constitution] not a ‘fixed blueprint’ [but rather] … a framework that cannot resolve all our differences but offers … ‘a way by which we argue about our future.’ ”⁹

As noted earlier, Obama echoes deliberative democracy in his speeches. His stubborn insistence on bipartisan debate, often in defiance of his advisers, is another demonstration of it in his practice.

Obama used the work of the radical American community organizer, Saul Alinsky (1909–1972)—whom William F. Buckley Jr. described as “very close to being an organizational genius”—to fashion his practice model “on the ground.” (Obama also taught Alinsky’s method at the University of Chicago.) Obama’s signature trait of empathy was also characteristic of Alinsky.

Alinsky was famously confrontational in his profile and tactics, in sharp contrast to Obama’s profile-consistent, famous bystander aversion to confrontation. This difference between them was part of what Obama had to contend with in the second, constraint stage of model building (Chapter Twelve).

OBAMA’S HIGH-STAKES TENDENCIES

Even before the 2008 campaign, Obama had acted in high-stakes political situations. At a White House meeting at the height of the financial crisis, it was Obama rather than then President Bush or Republican nominee John McCain, who was in charge, according to Jonathan Alter in The Promise, physically preventing a fight between Congressman Barney Frank and Hank Paulsen, treasury secretary.

Since his inauguration, high stakes have been the rule. On the domestic front: a crippling recession; record-high unemployment; united opposition from Senate Republicans; the rising antigovernment Tea Party movement; questions about his identity and citizenship from the so-called Birthers; a liberal base whose high expectations were bound to be disappointed by the realities of the presidency; more unexpectedly, an attempted terrorist attack over Christmas 2009 and a Gulf Coast oil spill that is the worst environmental disaster in American history. On the foreign policy front: inherited wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an increasingly aggressive North Korea and Iran, and the Wikileaks leaking of military and diplomatic cables. Obama’s status as the first black U.S. president, the Muslim religious strand in his heritage, and his formative years spent in a foreign country further raise the stakes and dangers related to the fact that so many Ameri­cans view him as a hostile “other” despite his completely unhostile manner. (Daily threats on his life are reported at four times the number aimed at his predecessor.¹⁰)

Moral Posture and Hero Choice

In high-stakes situations, Obama’s profile suggests a moral tendency toward the adjudicator in his handling of events and the “other.” But this is balanced somewhat by an advocate strain, which, again, he keeps under wraps both for political and personal reasons (Chapter Nine).

Earlier I mentioned Obama’s theme of abandonment, which is associated with the hero choice of survivor in very high stakes; and Obama is primarily a survivor. As I also mentioned earlier, the dark side here is that as survivors tend to abandon themselves to a larger cause, in the process of extrapolation, they abandon, through psychological or physical distancing, those they love and those who love them most. But at the same time, I suspect that Obama reserves and maintains a protector side for personal relations, a side that does not typically get expressed in public. I mentioned one striking exception to this—his behavior before and during his 2011 speech after the shooting in Tucson. In his desire to hear and publicly share people’s stories, he visited victims in the hospital and spoke with their families. What made his speech that night one of his best and most moving was his display of empathy, which is how he exhibits his protector self.

How did Obama come to choose the survivor and protector modes? For one thing, his mother was most likely a survivor (with random tendencies in meaning). Ann in no way resembles the fixer hero, and whatever protector inclinations she harbored were undermined by her tendencies to drift in a sea of possibilities far from home and hearth. She found meaning and worthy causes to get excited about where others saw only the ordinary. In one of the random’s frequent contradictions, she could knuckle down and get things done. Her thousand-page dissertation, which developed a model of microfinance that is now Indonesia’s standard, and the seven years she spent as consultant and research coordinator for Indonesia’s oldest bank are examples.¹¹

Some of this must have rubbed off on the young Obama. Ann’s no-nonsense, predawn homeschooling instilled endurance, stoic self-discipline, and an explorer’s appetite for the adventure of learning, a perfect recipe for the survivor type.

Survivors are very good bystanders, and most bystanders get their start early, from seeing their own families “from the balcony,” so to speak. Obama began practicing at Punahou. His good fortune at attending there notwithstanding, being one of four blacks among thirty-five hundred mostly white and privileged students drove him to a social space where survivors hang out and thrive—at the margin. On one hand, perhaps more in his own mind than in reality, his blackness set him apart. On the other hand, defining himself as an outsider looking in was great boot-camp training for a neophyte survivor.

Survivors have a tolerance for physical and mental challenge (one could even say they have a need to define themselves in terms of such challenges); and for some, the harsher the conditions, the better. Obama’s first ascetic experiences came in his boyhood, with his mother as his guide. Later as a young man, concluding that life at Occidental College was seductively easy and soft, he chose the cold, harsh Northeast, where, again ascetically stripping down to essentials, he could explore, under more challenging conditions, his identity and his destiny.

Obama’s reading at Columbia included writings by and about a long list of past and present black and nonblack accomplished heroes. From those giants he apparently singled out a few, according to two criteria: they were models of heroic character by his measures, principally that they contributed to uncensored recognition of the shame and fully neglected rights of blacks; and they matched his own emerging heroic behavioral propensities. They had great minds (Lincoln), took heroic stands in crises that put them at risk (Martin Luther King Jr.), represented great causes that benefited those shortchanged in man’s universal right to justice and fairness (both Lincoln and King), had testable strategies designed to realize such a noble cause (Alinsky and Mandela), and expressed a strong “I can” personal mantra. All these men were or are, by our definition and not coincidentally, also survivor types.

“I’ve Never Seen a Meeting Like That”

Earlier I noted Obama’s high-stakes moral tendency toward the adjudicator and briefly mentioned his role in one Bush-era White House meeting. Here is a fuller account of that incident, in which dramatically outsized behaviors of other leaders shocked the aggression-averse Obama. The account is based largely on evidence from Alter’s The Promise, which is remarkably balanced and free of moral certitude.¹²

In this scene, Obama is the mover; McCain is a disabled follower, then a silent or disabled bystander; when Cheney lapses into silence, he becomes an intimidating bystander as covert opposer; Bush throughout is an ineffectual mover who concedes the meeting to Obama; Barney Frank is gearing up for a high-stakes battle in his mover-opposer stance. Here’s what happened:

When the 2008 recession hit, just before the presidential debates were about to begin, Senator McCain called for a meeting in the cabinet room. The group was to vote on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s three-page bailout plan. Obama “was the only one of the big dogs who seemed to know what he was talking about. Obama was taking charge of the meeting—and the crisis—peppering the others with detailed questions.”

Barney Frank and Spencer Bachus were ready for a brawl. The two men started squabbling over whether the Democrats had been blindsided that morning.

“Now Paulson was down on one knee, pleading with the Democrats not to ‘blow up’ the deal. It was hard to know how serious he was, but others in the room found it scary to see the treasury secretary pathetically praying in the middle of a crisis.”

Barney Frank “started yelling, ‘Fuck you, Hank! Fuck you! Blow up this deal? We didn’t blow up this deal! Your guys blew up the deal. You better tell Bachus and the rest of them to get their shit together!’ When Paulson tried to equivocate, Frank threw in another ‘Fuck you, Hank!’—his third of the day.” (Moving from escalation to noise, Frank is almost out of control—and behaving typically for the mover-opposer in extreme high-stakes situations.)

“The only person standing between Frank and Paulson was Barack Obama, who bent his arms and spread his palms to keep the two men apart. ‘Okay, guys,’ Obama said, like a teacher preventing a playground brawl.”

“Obama took control of the conversation, cool as usual. ‘Calm down, Barney. Let’s sort this out,’ he said. ‘Hank, you’ve got to go back and talk to Spencer and put this thing back together.’ ”

    

Obama was cool from start to finish: at the start, fully prepared from having read Paulson’s document (typical bystander in meaning), but ready to facilitate—that is, to invite others to speak, or move—with rapid-fire questions (moving from the bystander stance), and remaining “cool” (preserving his power as a bystander). When Barney Frank, likely after something or someone triggered a toxic theme, raised the stakes for all when his anger almost turned physical, Obama, still cool and rational, put out the fire. For him the external stakes were as high as they were for Frank, Pelosi, and others, but his bystander capacity carried the day.

This brawl, enacted in behind-the-scenes politics, exactly captures the tone and intensity of the ClearFacts team’s escalation described in Chapter Eight.

    

President Obama has been on a microscope slide of acute political observation since he stepped on the national stage to deliver his party’s keynote in 2004. He remains so to this day and, I suspect, will continue to be scrupulously studied until his place in history is firmly established. Obama is liked well enough, but the 2012 election will test his mettle. As the world watches, the right batters him over the head with a debt ceiling, and the left accuses him of hamstringing government programs. More than ever, in his bid for a second term it is important that he fight.

The media, across the political spectrum, have had surprisingly similar, and mostly critical, things to say about Obama’s performance as a leader to date. In contrast, historians and biographers have seen this same leader in a mostly positive light. I have attempted to put both perspectives through our own allegedly objective prism, but also praised him for what I believe all leaders must do, the hard work of developing a model.

Now I take another step, daring to write a memo to the president, about how his role as a leader in the future affects his constituents, all Americans, and indeed the world at large.

EXIT MEMORANDUM

TO: President Obama

FROM: Duncan Travis (aka Dr. David Kantor)

RE: FAREWELL, AND MOVING FORWARD

President Obama: I will present my thoughts on your story and behavioral profile and how it affects your leadership. I will also provide you with a road map for your future as president. You should know by now that the deliverer of change is inseparable from what is being changed, so read this with my behavioral profile in mind.

I firmly believe that most manifestations of a leader’s patterned behaviors emerge from what I call the childhood story of imperfect love; that this story in turn leads to the gathering of another set of structural stories that determine the leader’s behavioral preferences; and finally that these stories create themes from mild to toxic that affect his or her behavior in high stakes.

Mr. President, the monarch’s (that is, your father’s) role in your childhood stories is quite clear. The missing act of love by the mother is less clear. It would be of great benefit to explore both of these relationships (and stories) further. Until you put your mother’s contribution to your success in the world in better perspective than you express in Dreams from My Father, you may leave unfilled gaps in your capacity to love (and perhaps, come across as cold and aloof). Failure to take into account your father’s effects on you can similarly handicap your potential. You operate in the volatile and oppositional world of politics. Although your trip to Kenya, described in Dreams from My Father, resulted positively in dissipation rather than liberation of legitimate anger, this very anger is needed to confront those rivals whose hostility threatens you, your policies, and the nation. Your capacity as a leader can be inhibited by the calm you’ve learned.

You also could be putting excessive pressure on the First Lady to compensate for your mother’s alleged lapses in love. The way I read your story, abandonment (though you might call it loneliness) is a leftover toxic theme. Mrs. Obama has revealed enough of her story to make clear that she feels at least slightly burdened by your unfinished family business.

Judging from your young-adult hero myth, you are a survivor hero. For some insight into your relationships with Mrs. Obama, look to the survivor’s gray zone (Chapter Nine) and how the hero’s psychological self-abandonment leaves his lover in the shadow of the scaffold as he chooses his cause over life and love (a reference to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). Mr. President, the First Lady seems to tighten the reins (such as when you were deliberating whether to enter the campaign).

The role you play in life as a survivor requires immense input and commitment and self-sacrifice. Fortunately, your wife is savvy enough to avoid being eclipsed by the demands on you by focusing on fighting childhood obesity.

Mr. President, your survivor hero tendencies have been in quiet but abundant display from the day you assumed office. Your campaign slogan, “Yes We Can,” is the survivor’s mantra (Chapter Nine). Your ability to endure has seen you through great pressure, and it is clear that it will continue to serve you as you mature as a leader.

Now I will focus on your behavioral profile.

I have assessed you primarily as a bystander in open meaning. In the media, you have taken considerable flack. It is common for the media—especially opinion makers—to speak in moral language (Chapter Eight). Structural dynamics and the behavioral profile attempt to describe the same behavior in “structural” terms, a studiously nonjudgmental language.

The media have leveled criticism on you. What we see and hear criticized is a leader with a model, what I think is deliberative democracy. Few political leaders have models that go beyond ideology. What the media has been referring to in moral tones and that I have been translating into the neutral language of structural dynamics is your behavioral profile in action under relentlessly high-stakes conditions. (Chapters Eight and Nine show how our profiles change when subjected to high stakes.)

One addition: the media, and even your most ardent supporters, have said you have failed to deliver a coherent narrative. Considering your well-received books and in­spiring presidential campaign in 2008, your failure at storytelling a la Roosevelt and Reagan is puzzling. Please refer to my chapter on narrative purpose (Chapter Seven) and get to work on creating your own.

The twenty leader capacities are discussed in Chapter Fourteen. Here is how I believe you score:

Obama’s Highs, Lows, and Growing Edge

Highs	Lows	Growing Edge
Empathizing with others Operating under pressure Knowing the self (with the exception of knowing when to show legitimate anger) Managing teams Acting morally Tolerating difference Compromising with others	Showing humility Articulating narrative purpose Knowing when to show legitimate anger Taking risks	Balancing arrogance and humility
		Articulating narrative purpose
		Knowing when to show legitimate anger

First, the sugar; then, the medicine. And then … the doctor is out!

The Highs

You showed incredible empathy in your speech at the funeral of Christina Taylor Green in January 2011. You were even criticized by political foes for suggesting that empathy was a quality you would look for in a Supreme Court justice.

Politics aside, you have amassed impressive accomplishments in your short time as president, including health care reform, financial reform, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

You have performed admirably under tremendous pressure—two wars in the Middle East, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and a fractured populace—and this is because you put together a competent, bipartisan cabinet; were willing to tolerate debate; and sought compromise when you could.

Your eloquent books and speeches show that you are remarkably reflective on yourself and introspective and have a firm set of core moral values. These qualities will be of use to you as you and your staff read Reading the Room (I can only hope) and continue to develop your model.

The Lows and the Growing Edge

A man of so many successes—the presidency of the Harvard Law Review; a best-selling, well-acclaimed book; a mesmerizing and winning campaign for the presidency; and the Nobel Peace Prize, for that matter—understandably thinks well of himself.

But Mr. President, it is widely believed that you are not a humble man. I have spoken with friends and colleagues of yours, over dinner-table conversations in Cambridge, and this has been their primary criticism. Furthermore, you infamously said, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary” during the 2008 campaign, a comment that made even your staffers gasp in disappointment. Ms. Clinton handled herself gracefully, but this embarrassing put-down made you seem arrogant and vain. However, the “shellacking” you took in the 2010 elections since changed your tone, and your announ­cement of the death of Osama bin Laden—an obvious occasion for puffing your chest feathers—was instead short, somber, and serious. Here, you have a growing edge.

I must make one final point about your low and growing-edge scores. I have said this before: you must fight, and, in order to succeed, you must break through the calm you have developed. There is a delicate line you walk as perhaps the most watched and listened to black man in the world. You look to the fallout over Reverend Wright’s explosion as a warning, but you hold a different position and set of responsibilities. Your duty to the country commands you to fight; I encourage you to look to the unfinished business with your father and find the spirit to do so.

As I previously mentioned, articulating a grand, inspiring vision for the country is a challenge with which every president struggles. Reading Chapter Seven, Narrative Purpose, will help. So, too, will the 2012 presidential campaign. You have shown an ability to connect—such as in your speeches at the 2004 Democratic National Convention on race and in Tucson—and you must find a way to translate this ability to address the gigantic sum of peoples, places, and problems that is America.

The only low score you receive where I do not see a growing edge is in taking risks. Democrats and liberals remain frustrated that you did not seek a public option in your health care bill. Your predecessor, known as “the Decider,” would have scored high here. (Due to the nature of risks, though, this is not always the best quality.) My advice: you have a high capacity for acting morally. When you believe something is morally important and right (for example, the assassination of Osama bin Laden) and has a good chance of success, the hazard of risk taking becomes the necessity of risk taking—an audacious suggestion; however, I believe you are quite familiar with audacity.

It has been a true pleasure working with you. Good luck, and God Bless America.

David Kantor, Ph.D.

Notes

1. Cassandra Butts, quoted in Remnick, D. The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. New York: Knopf, 2010. N/A.

2. As Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg observes, Obama’s “books manifest his serious engagement with the life of the mind” and that “[m]uch as he might need to mask it on the campaign trail … his books make clear that Barack Obama is also very much an intellectual.” Kloppenberg, J. T. Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.

3. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama.

4. Mack, K. W. “Barack Obama Before He Was a Rising Political Star.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Autumn 2004, pp. 98–101.

5. Obama, B. Dreams from My Father. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995.

6. Christopher Edley Jr., quoted in Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. N/A.

7. Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, p. 208.

8. Reykowski, J. “Deliberative Democracy and ‘Human Nature’: An Empirical Approach.” Political Psychology, 2006, 27(3), 325.

9. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama.

10. Harnden, T. “Barack Obama Faces 30 Death Threats a Day, Stretching US Secret Service.” Telegraph, Aug. 3, 2009. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/5967942/Barack-Obama-faces-30-death-threats-a-day-stretching-US-Secret-Service.html.

11. Scott, J. A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011.

12. All quotations in this account are from Alter, J. The Promise. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010, pp. 11–13.