Columnists as different as Howard Fineman and George Will note in the latest Newsweek President Obama?s modesty deficit.
Will turns to the president?s past in assessing his present state of affairs:
Obama, a former lecturer in constitutional law, continues to say things that reveal an astonishingly inflated sense of his place in our complex constitutional order. To Sawyer he also said: “There’s a legislative process that is taking place in Congress, and I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked.” No one, at least no one who has passed a high-school civics class, thinks Obama was elected to change Congress’s operations. Who was the last president who did change them? Presidents come and go; Congress, with its distinctive culture?two cultures, actually?and institutional pride, abides.
Meanwhile, Fineman ? a fan of Obama?s State of the Union speech ? offers his own reservations:
[T]he attribute that gave the speech its force also gives me pause. The address sometimes seemed more about Obama himself than about the country. At times it was not so much his thoughts on the state of the Union as it was his thoughts on the state of his presidency, and on our view of him. “Now, I am not naive,” the president said. “I never thought that the mere fact of my election would usher in peace, harmony, and some post-partisan era.” And later: “I have never suggested that change would be easy, or that I can do it alone.” (Now he tells us!) Then, in the closing flourish: “I don’t quit.” (You’d better not: you have a four-year contract.)
In the post-Oprah age, we not only accept but also even demand this kind of intimate, almost confessional style in our leaders and public figures. Most Americans like Obama as a person, and most want him to succeed as a president. But he has to remember that he’s supposed to be a character in our story?not the other way around.
