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Obama After One Year: The Loneliest Job

5 minute read
Nancy Gibbs

There is a moment in every White House tenure when you can practically see the President walk away from everyone he’s known, everyone he’s been, because he now has thoughts and fears and hopes that no one else can fathom. Franklin Roosevelt faced a collapsing economy. Harry Truman had to decide whether to drop the atom bomb. John F. Kennedy found himself invading Cuba. I wonder when Obama’s moment came, as he splashed into office through a sea of red ink, ended his first year with a national-security nightmare and in between set out to pass a health care reform bill that a majority of the public now doesn’t want.

Presidents seldom get the presidency they hoped for. They don’t manage their inbox; it manages them, and they have to adjust to the paradox of power: as soon as they get it, they discover they rarely get to decide how to use it. This isn’t what I came here to do, a President sighs, to which the answer is, Too damn bad. Lonely and frustrated is what being President means, and when Obama summons his predecessors’ ghosts late at night, they can tell him how it went.

(See who’s who in Barack Obama’s White House.)

“The family left for Missouri last evening,” Truman wrote in his diary a couple of months into office in 1945. “I’m always so lonesome when the family leaves. I have no one to raise a fuss over my neckties and my haircuts, my shoes and my clothes generally.” He still had plenty of friends left in Washington; it’s just that he was finding, as every President finds, that many of them lose their minds. House Speaker Sam Rayburn warned him about it: “Sycophants will stand in the rain a week to see you and will treat you like a king,” he said. “They’ll come sliding in and tell you you’re the greatest man alive — but you know and I know you ain’t.”

Every President needs those people who tell them they ain’t the king. Kennedy talked about “the poison of the presidency,” the way proximity to power could warp the judgment of even the wisest allies. It’s one reason Kennedy’s father wanted him to make his brother Attorney General and why First Ladies wield power that can never be adequately measured by the list of causes they support.

(See pictures of Michelle Obama behind the scenes.)

But the real loneliness of the office does not come from old friends preening and new ones pretending. It comes from the nature of the job. Dwight D. Eisenhower recalled how as a general, before D-Day, he had to decide whether to send two paratroop divisions into a sector where 9 out of 10 would probably be slaughtered. He eventually decided the troops were essential to the mission, and for years after that, he said, “I felt that only once in a lifetime could a problem of that sort weigh as heavily on a man’s mind and heart.” Then he became President and found a comparable burden, “when one man must conscientiously, deliberately, prayerfully scrutinize every argument, every proposal, every prediction, every alternative, every probable outcome of his action, and then — all alone — make his decision.”

(See pictures of Obama’s personal touches to the Oval Office.)

A year ago at his Inauguration, Obama affirmed that “we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” Maybe it’s the memory of those huge, happy crowds that makes the contrast between then and now so irresistible. OBAMA WALKS A LONG AND LONELY ROAD, observed a recent headline in the Financial Times, and that image is everywhere — a once untouchably popular figure unable to connect as President the way he did as a candidate or shine the light of hope and change on the dingy business of governing. As his approval rating fell almost 20 points, to below 50%, the freshman report cards talked about irate independents and mutinous liberals and how even Michelle can’t radiate enough warmth to compensate for his apparent lack of a pulse.

(See pictures of Barack Obama on Flickr.)

“Make no mistake” is one of Obama’s verbal twitches, and it’s as much a prayer as a preface. He can’t afford mistakes when the stakes are this high: the economy still wobbly, his agenda embattled and America’s enemies snarling loudly. To chalk his troubles up to his personality — he’s too cool, too contradictory, the divisive conciliator, the extreme centrist — underestimates the scale of the challenge he faces. It would be nice for Presidents to have magical powers, and Obama convinced many people that he had them, not least by managing to get himself elected in the first place. But his rhetorical gifts can now work against him, when he raises expectations only to see them crash into realities for which he’s now held accountable. Make no mistake, indeed; lonely does not begin to describe where he lives now.

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