A Classic Loner

The temperament of Obama is becoming an interesting subject of speculation.  Take, for instance, the following passage from Joe Klein's recent front page article on Obama in Time magazine.

On the morning he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama met with a nervous group of aides. The award might be a political problem, they said. It might be ridiculed. He hadn't achieved any of his foreign policy goals yet. "It is kind of crazy," Obama acknowledged with a laugh, "but that's not the real problem we're facing here. How do you accept the Nobel Peace Prize when you're the Commander in Chief of a military that is fighting two wars?"

The President's next meeting was about one of those wars — the one in Afghanistan — with his National Security Council in the Situation Room. Everyone stood as the President entered. "I was waiting for people to start applauding or someone to say, 'Congratulations, Mr. President,' or something like that," an aide recalls. "But no one said anything, and the President didn't say anything about the prize either. He just started in on the agenda."

Taken together, these two meetings speak to an abiding enigma of the Obama presidency. From the start, the President has been the impassive receptacle of passionate hopes and impossible expectations — from the expectations of the American people after a wildly emotional election victory and Inauguration to those of the Nobel Committee. There is an essential disconnect here, an emotional distance from the public, an emotional distance from his own staff. Take the National Security Council meeting after he won the prize: Clinton would have hugged everyone in sight; George W. Bush would have made a self-deprecating C-student joke; Reagan might have said, "First, I'd like to thank the Academy ..." The only recent Presidents who might have responded as aridly as Obama did were Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, both replaced by world-class emoters after one term. "He is a classic loner," says a politician who helped coach Obama for debates during the campaign. "Usually, you work hard at prep, and then everyone, including the candidate, kicks back and has a meal together. Obama would go off and eat by himself. He is very self-contained. He is not needy."

Or this article by Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek that's basically saying the same thing.

I can relate to this, because in many ways it's my temperament as well.  It's the personality of an 'introverted thinker', using Myers-Briggs Typology language.  None the less, in front of a crowd, Obama can connect, as he can one-on-one.  He has this ability, but it's still not his natural temperament.  So he reverts back to normal in many, less public situations.

Is this the reason for his current problems?  No, I really don't think so.  Rather, it's other, more objective factors, like the economy, ending of the political honeymoon, disagreement over policy, etc.