This weekend’s New York Times had a great article by Jodi Kantor on the leadership of Barack Obama. It gave some great insights on how he got to where he is today and how he may operate as President. Here's some of things I found interesting (all taken from the article itself):
Running Meetings
Barack Obama has always run meetings by a particular set of rules. Everyone contributes; silent lurkers will be interrogated. (He wants to “suck the room of every idea,” said Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser.) Mention a theory and Mr. Obama asks how it translates on the ground. He orchestrates debate, playing participants off each other — and then highlights their areas of agreement. He constantly restates others’ contributions in his own invariably more eloquent words. But when the session ends, his view can remain a mystery, and his ultimate call is sometimes a surprise to everyone who was present.
Those meetings, along with the career they span, provide hints about what sort of president Mr. Obama might be if elected. They suggest a cool deliberator, a fluent communicator, a professor with a hunger for academic expertise but little interest in abstraction. He may be uncomfortable making decisions quickly or abandoning a careful plan. A President Obama would prize consensus, except when he would disregard it. And his lifelong penchant for control would likely translate into a disciplined White House.
Making Lemonade
Turning deficits into assets — a skill Mr. Obama learned in his 20s as a community organizer — could well be called the motto of his rise. With his literary gifts, he transformed a fatherless childhood into a stirring coming-of-age tale. He used a glamourless state senator’s post as the foundation of his political career. He mobilized young people — never an ideal base, because of thin wallets and historically poor turnout — into an energetic army who in turn enlisted parents and grandparents. And even though his exotic name, Barack Hussein Obama, has spurred false rumors and insinuations about his background and beliefs, he has made it a symbol of his singularity and of America’s possibility.
Controlling His Image
There is little Mr. Obama has controlled more tightly than his own story and message. Just as he was planning his entry into politics, he used “Dreams From My Father” to cast his peripatetic, confusing childhood into a lyrical journey. When he was elected to the United States Senate in 2004, Mr. Obama wrote his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” laying out his political philosophy. It meant getting only three or four hours of sleep at night, his editor said, but he insisted on writing the entire thing himself’. (He not only read policy books to prepare, but also some of the articles cited in their footnotes.) For his presidential campaign speechwriter, he chose a 26-year-old who describes his job as channeling the thoughts of a boss who already knows what he wants to say.
Trying to Maintain Discipline and Control
The senator has the discipline to avoid flaunting his oratorical gifts. Periodically during the campaign, rivals accused him of offering more style than substance; Mr. Obama responded with such sober speeches that supporters started to worry he was dull.
Like all other campaigns, Mr. Obama’s is imbued with its leader’s personality: it is a tight, centralized structure, run by a tiny group that permits no leaks. On the trail, Mr. Obama has struggled with the unpredictable questions and irritating time limits of presidential debates. He does not always react swiftly to unexpected shifts. This summer, Mr. Obama had just finished a perfectly planned tour of Europe when Russia blitzed into neighboring Georgia; he took several days to settle on a position. After Mr. McCain’s surprise selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, the Obama campaign seemed to struggle to react.
The only time Mr. Obama slips from “his normal cool self,” said Marty Nesbitt, a close friend, is “when something surprises him.”
In 2004, Mr. Obama gained sudden fame and fortune: his convention speech drew a nationwide standing ovation, he won a Senate seat, and he signed a multimillion-dollar book contract. Flush with cash for the first time, he made two financial decisions that cast doubt on his reputation as an anti-corruption crusader. He set up a blind trust for his investments, but sloppily so, managing to put thousands of dollars into a biotech company that was developing a drug to treat avian flu just as he pushed for federal financing to battle the disease.
Decision Making
When it comes to making decisions, Mr. Obama’s impulse for control translates into a kind of deliberative restraint. He has always required time to mull: As a community organizer, he spent his evenings filling journals, trying to sort out the day’s confusion. During his seven years as a state senator, he used the time driving between Springfield and Chicago for contemplation; when staffers suggested that a candidate for the United States Senate should have a driver, Mr. Obama resisted, saying the driver might intrude. Hence Mr. Obama’s fluster when he misses his daily gym time. “That’s when he can get his mind straight,” said Jim Cauley, his campaign manager in the United States Senate race.
Mr. Obama resists making quick judgments or responding to day-to-day fluctuations, aides say. Instead he follows a familiar set of steps: Perform copious research. Solicit expertise. (What delighted Mr. Obama most about becoming a United States senator, he told an old boss, was his access to top scholars: he was a kid in the Princeton and Stanford candy shops.) Project all likely scenarios. Devise a plan. Anticipate objections. Adjust the plan, and once it’s in place, stick with it. In part, this approach explains how Mr. Obama won in the primaries: he exploited the electoral calendar and arcane differences in voting methods, and while Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton continually tried out new messages, Mr. Obama modified his only slightly, even when some supporters urged more dramatic change.
Contextualist
Defenders say that Mr. Obama’s reticence is as intellectual as it is tactical. He is a contextualist by nature, they say, suspicious of generalizations. He lived in enough places, at an early enough age, to realize that the same solutions do not work everywhere. Unlike his mother, an idealistic dreamer who moved to Indonesia without realizing a brutal coup had just taken place there, Mr. Obama seems more wary of venturing too far than not far enough. And his years teaching law — particularly chronicling the failure of broad, court-led efforts at social change — gave him a distrust of one-size-fits-all policies.
Countless times on the campaign trail, Mr. Obama has cited the forceful speech he delivered in 2002 against the impending Iraq invasion. It had an unusual mantra for an antiwar rally: “I’m not opposed to all wars,” Mr. Obama repeated again and again, making his point as narrowly as possible.
Similarly, in the recent presidential debates, the candidates twice wrangled over the same question: how should the government cut spending? Mr. McCain called for an across-the-board freeze, but Mr. Obama resisted. “That’s using a hatchet,” he said. “I want to use a scalpel,” he continued, once again bypassing broad principle for a case-by-case approach.
A Commitment to Dialogue
As a law professor at the University of Chicago, Mr. Obama taught a young woman named Uzma Sattar, who was unpopular in class, students said, because of comments she made that others frequently found abrasive. But in a recent interview Ms. Sattar said that Mr. Obama, whom she visited during office hours, was kinder to her than any other faculty member — the only one, she said, who seemed to understand the loneliness of being the sole woman to wear a headscarf.
Barack Obama prides himself on trying to see the world through others’ eyes. In his books, he slips into the heads of his Kenyan relatives, teenage mothers in Chicago, Reagan Democrats, bean farmers in Southern Illinois, and evangelical Christian voters.
He won the presidency of the Harvard Law Review in part because, weeks before voting, he made a speech in favor of affirmative action that so eloquently summarized the objections to it that the Review’s conservatives decided he felt their concerns deeply.
That very first presidential election, carried out in the law school’s stately, leaf-strewn quadrangle, would prove typical of Mr. Obama’s lifelong quest to mediate conflict, and of the way that goal has merged with his own quest for advancement. He wants those on each side of the most toxic conflicts in American life — over race, faith, abortion — to resolve their differences, and in resolving them, to join his cause as well. He has a deep philosophical commitment to dialogue, suggesting that more of it will heal America’s bruised standing in the world, and he has expressed far more willingness to meet with enemies than his primary or general election opponents.
Mr. Obama’s tendency to see things from the perspectives of others, aides say, meant that during the primaries, he could not work up much antipathy for his rivals.
“He’s not consumed by hatred for his opponents,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist.
