Obama Finally Finds His Inner Outrage

The ferocity of the criticism of President Obama for the failed Christmas Day bombing offers a glimpse into what might happen if a real attack occurred. At least half the country—those with political allegiance to red-state America—wouldn't rally around the president the way everybody did on 9/11, despite President Bush's considerable shortcomings, in the chaotic hours that followed the attacks. It would be another chance to score political points.

It took Obama 72 hours to calibrate his response and get past the images of playing golf and eating snow cones. Democrats are always put on the defensive by Republican attacks when it comes to national security, and it didn't help that Obama was sequestered at a rented place on the beach in Hawaii, out of range of most of America. The bellicose words of former vice president Dick Cheney filled the void, evoking nostalgia for the tough talk of the Bush era. The charge that a distracted Obama had dropped the ball on terrorism gained traction.

The security system that failed on Christmas Day was put in place by the Bush administration, but facts don't matter as much as perception in today's overheated partisan climate. By the time he returned to Washington, Obama was making up for lost time, sounding more outraged and determined than he usually does, promising to figure out how to fix the system and to report back within days to the American people on his plans to do so.

Even so, the intensely personal attacks on Obama are cause for concern. Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist based at Harvard who studies leadership, has a theory that Obama's troubles stem from the fact that people don't have a clear sense of what he would go to the mat for, that he's been defined more by the compromises he's willing to make than his core convictions.

By way of example, Gardner cites the movie Invictus, in which everybody tells Nelson Mandela that he shouldn't support the national all-white rugby team, which was associated with everything the new South Africa hated. But Mandela saw what was needed to bring the country together. In playing Mandela, Morgan Freeman knows how to listen and be respectful, but the steel comes through. Obama likes to set in place orderly processes to navigate tough issues, and that's great, but the voters want to know what he feels in his marrow. "Right now, they think he doesn't care enough about the things they care about. They want to see the passion, even if they don't agree with him," says Gardner.

He cites President Reagan and Sen. Ted Kennedy as models of conviction in their respective parties. Each conveyed a strong ideological grounding that gave them enormous leeway. Reagan raised taxes, or what he called "revenue enhancers," 13 times during his eight years in the White House, yet conservatives never doubted that his heart was with them. When Kennedy compromised to achieve a legislative goal, he could silence liberal critics in a way Obama cannot. Kennedy had championed liberal causes for decades; nobody questioned his commitment. Obama is new to the national scene, and on health care, he's been careful not to stake out any positions from which he can't retreat, which is why he's on the verge of getting a bill passed, something that eluded his most gifted predecessors.

Achieving health-care reform should be a moment of celebration, yet polls show the legislation is less popular with voters than the troop buildup in Afghanistan, a tribute to the Republicans' negative framing of the issue and a consequence of Obama's leadership style. Gardner doesn't doubt that Obama has core beliefs. The president's idealism and pragmatism are threads through his books. But his failure to convey his principles while he makes the necessary compromises lessens his ability to take credit for what he's accomplished. He's seen as an agent of compromise, someone who has no skin in the game aside from scoring political points. There's virtue in being the chief mediator, but it has to be balanced by action.

Each president tends to be an antidote to the one before. Bush was a man of action who reacted with his gut and never compromised. Obama is an intellectual who likes to muse his way through problems and who instinctively recoils from the confrontational style of his predecessor. The kind of change that Mandela brought to South Africa and that Obama's election promised to millions of Americans takes time to bring about. Obama thinks of himself as a good closer, a clutch player who performs when time is short. During the campaign, there were long stretches when it looked like Obama was more of a bystander than an active participant, and then he would suddenly spring to life.

In the arc of his presidency, it's already late in the game. Fortunately for him, and for us, this is the week when Obama found his inner outrage.

Eleanor Clift is also the author of Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics and Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment.