Obama’s is inaugurated, a realistic idealist takes the lead

Andrew Sullivan had a piece in the Sunday Times about Obama’s inauguration. Here’s a quote that Sullivan posted on his own blog today:

He doesn’t charm like Clinton did and Bush tried to. Unlike both men, but especially Clinton, he appears to have no need to be loved by everyone in the room. He often finds it hard to disguise how tired he feels. He is capable of evoking enormous inspiration, but he has yet to be able to hide it when he is bored. There is a wryness to his conversation and a dryness to his humor, both of which are sustained by an intellect of power. The revered liberal jurist Larry Tribe has said that in decades of teaching at Harvard Law School, he has never had a cleverer student than Obama. I don’t think he’s exaggerating. Intellectually, Obama is in Bill Clinton’s league. But what he has over Clinton is emotional intelligence to buttress his grasp of policy.
What he gets, what he seems to intuit, is how to make others feel as if they are being heard. This is simple enough in theory but hard to pull off consistently in practice. His model is to figure out what another person needs and, if it helps Obama to get what he wants, to provide it.
He sensed that Hillary Clinton needed independent respect in defeat. He couldn’t give her the vice-presidency, which she desperately wanted, because it would have given her a dangerous rival power base if they succeeded. So he offered her the next best thing, and she, unlike her husband, was smart enough to say yes.
He realised that Rick Warren was an egomaniac and wanted some kind of platform, so he gave him a largely symbolic role at the inauguration and allowed Warren to preen. He knew that what Washington pundits really craved was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw him a dinner party.
He sensed that McCain was in deep emotional withdrawal after his horrifying and crude descent into raw partisanship last autumn. And so he celebrated the old, bipartisan McCain and asked for his support in the Senate.
This is not typical for politicians in any climate and era. In the post-Clinton, post-Bush divide of the US, it’s a shock of sorts, and one most Washingtonians have yet to absorb. More shocks, I suspect, are to come, as people begin to realise that the new politics Obama promised is actually more than just a marketing device for a campaign.

Sullivan is one of the few pundits who have been able to grasp, from fairly early on, that Obama is both an idealist who wants to bring genuine change AND a realist who can work shrewdly and effectively within the political system. This “both/and” may be essence of Obama’s appeal to the young, postmodern generation. We know that the way forward passes through seeming contradictions, and that’s okay. We’re hoping for someone worthy of our trust to lead the way.

By the way, another man who once described himself as a realistic idealist is Gandhi. (Just to be clear, Obama hasn’t compared himself with Gandhi. I’m only suggesting the similarity as something to ponder. We are in a time of historic change after all.)