Boehner's whining is finding an audience

John Boehner, with an assist from Bob Woodward, is doing a nice job spinning the interpersonal side of his failed negotiations with Obama. While it's natural for right-wing media to take up his narrative, his spin is trickling into the mainstream, too.

On the right, the new image of Obama the Negotiator is oddly flattering, at least to the ears of a liberal accustomed to fretting about the president's accommodating style.. The personalized corollary of the right's current view of Obama as a legislative juggernaut is Obama as an imperious, arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway stonewaller. Here's Peggy Noonan:

He didn't deepen any relationships or begin any potential alliances with Republicans, who still, actually, hold the House. The old animosity was aggravated. Some Republicans were mildly hopeful a second term might moderate those presidential attitudes that didn't quite work the first time, such as holding himself aloof from the position and predicaments of those who oppose him, while betraying an air of disdain for their arguments. He is not quick to assume good faith. Some thought his election victory might liberate him, make his approach more expansive. That didn't happen.

Obama, intrextrovert

For a year or two, we've been awash in stories casting Obama as a singularity among politicians: a successful introvert.  He doesn't schmooze congress-folk, we read ad infinitum; he doesn't butter up billionaires, or at least doesn't keep them well buttered.

It's true he's no Bill Clinton, sniffing out crowds to soothe a recurring jones for mass adulation.  But he's no classic introvert, either, as this remembrance from Maraniss's Obama reminds me:

There were certain aspects of organizing at which he excelled. 280 While Loretta Augustine-Herron and Yvonne Lloyd were wary of some streets, even in familiar neighborhoods, and warned Obama away, he had no qualms about walking down any block or entering any house, no matter how threatening or odd. His life’s history was at work here. When you spend several formative years starting at age six immersed in an unfamiliar culture on the other side of the world, walking the exotic alleyways and pathways of the Menteng Dalam neighborhood of Jakarta, and figure out how to survive and thrive there, learning the language, seeming so at home that Indonesians come to think of you as one of them, nothing after that can seem too intimidating. But Lloyd was shocked one day when Obama reported that he had eaten at the house of a woman who was known for being a packrat, with old newspapers and detritus stacked high everywhere. “I said, ‘Did you go over and eat in that house? It’s not exactly the safest place in the world.’… He’d say, ‘Yeah, it was interesting.’ We’d say, ‘You need to stay away. Don’t walk through there.’ He’d laugh. It didn’t bother him. He was on that level with all of those people. I don’t know how he managed it because they were leery [of anyone walking up to their doors]. It was the way he approached them. That has a lot to do with why they would let him in. It’s like he belonged. Now he didn’t, and we know he didn’t, but he gave them kind of that feeling.”

Obama on the power of words

One moment in the formation of Obama's habit of mind that David Maraniss spotlights in his magisterial biography occured in high school:

Barry was not the most talkative student in her class, [English teacher Barbara Czurles-Nelson] recalled. He would sit near the back of the room, relaxed, waiting for his opening in the conversation. One day they were dealing with a philosophical question about what people should most fear. The answers included loneliness, death, hell, and war. Then Barry straightened up. That was the sign that he was ready to participate, Nelson thought, when he was sure to sharpen the class discussion.  “Words,” he said. “Words are the power to be feared most.… Whether directed personally or internationally, words can be weapons of destruction” (pp. 299-300, Kindle Edition).

Though the emphasis is on danger, the resemblance is still striking to the moment that first fully impressed on me Obama's potential to be the transformative president he said he wanted to be, when he again spoke of the power of words. It was in a debate with Hillary, between  the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, Jan. 5, 2008: