Obama's 'Default Mode'

Joseph Lelyveld writes about the aspect of Barack Obama that dominates everything else (in a review of David Remnick's new book on Obama in the NYReview):

However the Obama presidency turns out, it’s all too obvious already that it’s unlikely to be remembered as an era of good feelings in which the partisan divide was healed as the candidate optimistically promised.

What Remnick’s portrayal of Obama’s political evolution makes clear is that the promise was more than a calculated choice, a campaign pose. It was intrinsic to his character and recognized as such early on. As far back as Harvard Law School, he stood out for “his way of absorbing and synthesizing the arguments of others,” for his “earnest, consensus-seeking style,” for an “open-mindedness [that] seemed strange even to his friends.” Later on, when as an obscure state legislator he sat in on a seminar at the Kennedy School, the seminar’s leader, Robert Putnam, was struck by Obama’s ability “to listen for a whole day and see common themes in the midst of an arguing bunch.”

It’s a refrain to which Remnick regularly returns. “Conciliation [is Obama’s] default mode,” he writes, “the dominant strain of his political personality.” The 43 percent of whites who voted for the first African-American president presumably recognized this quality. Its effect on an irreconcilable portion of the 55 percent of whites who voted against him is suggested by the fury of the Tea Party activists. That’s a paradox yet to be resolved. The very qualities of thoughtfulness and patience that made Obama’s election seem such a hopeful harbinger now make him vulnerable to charges of weakness from both flanks of the political divide. It’s who he is.

Last night on Hardball, Chris Matthews and his friends were hitting on Obama for not defending himself against accusations from the Right. This 'default mode' really explains why he wouldn't, I think.