The night Obama first shone
by David Maraniss, The Washington Post, September 1, 2012
For all of his other characteristics — his unease about schmoozing, his writer’s sensibility as a participant observer, what some misinterpret as aloofness — the essence of Obama as a candidate is that of a confident jock, the guy Nesbitt hung with the day before his speech. He thrives on competition and does not shrink from it. Anyone who has played basketball with him, or poker, or even ping-pong or golf, will say the same things about his trash-talking, his boasting, his need to win. I’ve often said of Bill Clinton and Obama, two of my biographical subjects, that Clinton is hot and Obama is cool, but they burn at the same temperature inside. Just do it — that is the Obama of the campaign.
But if he wins a second term, the Obama I expect to emerge will more closely follow the lines of his 2004 speech. The right wing has made a cottage industry out of portraying him as a shape-shifter, trained by socialists, whose true leftist ideology will come out in a second term. His history points in the opposite direction. As a young man negotiating the shoals of race in America, as president of the Harvard Law Review, as a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago and as a state senator in Springfield, his instincts were to search for common ground. It has proved harder in the White House than anywhere he had been before, and there is no guarantee it would be any easier during a second term. But that is where he sees greatness, and that is what will drive him — those same thoughts he scrawled out during those summer days eight years ago when he was confined to the Senate chamber in Springfield.
