Caught In the Act Of Thinking

Mid-tweet in last week's press conference, reporters were already complaining that President Obama wasn't making news. And by the old standards, they were right. Obama didn't drop any bombshells, or rein in his agenda, as so many have been urging, or tee up a YouTube-ready sound bite. The same gasbags who had blasted him for demeaning the presidency by cracking jokes on "The Tonight Show" and drinking a beer at a basketball game (hadn't some favored George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 precisely because he was better "to have a beer with"?) now claim Obama's boring. On Sunday he had to defend himself on "60 Minutes" from the charge that he was "punch drunk" with mirth; by Wednesday, he was derided as too serious and professorial.

If it's the latter, Obama's the cool professor who gets strong student reviews, as he did when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School. A year ago, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's onetime strategist, compared him to his fellow Illinoisan, Adlai Stevenson, in order to discredit the upstart as an effete intellectual. Penn failed, in part because Obama won't refute the charge by dumbing down his language or playing the plebe (as George H.W. Bush did by eating pork rinds) or otherwise pandering to those with less bandwidth in ways he knows are inauthentic. When Stevenson was running for president in the 1950s, a woman approached him and said, "Governor, you have the support of every thinking American." Stevenson replied, "That's nice, but I need a majority." Obama is less cynical about the public. He seems perfectly content to be caught in the act of thinking in prime time.

In doing so, I'd venture that he was making news in a larger sense. He was signaling that he actually trusts people to stick with him through a complex, long-term argument. This is a radical idea and a helluva bet for an American president.

The whole Obama gamble has been a bit misunderstood. In 2007 Bill Clinton told Charlie Rose that electing Obama would be a "roll of the dice" for voters. Not so much. Despite some slip-ups—especially in taking nearly two months to address the credit crisis—Obama has not proved a risky choice. He looks steady and competent and accomplished. While it was sold poorly, the recovery bill he signed was actually four or five major pieces of legislation in one, and adds up to more public investment than at any time in nearly half a century. It was also the largest tax cut in American history.

But if the public wasn't gambling last fall (John McCain was arguably the riskier choice), the president is now. Obama is tripling down, wagering not just that his recovery plan will work but that he can simultaneously dent three huge problems (not fix, dent) that keep getting worse. He's telling the people exactly what to expect from him for the duration of his presidency. He's insisting that repairing the nation's "foundation" begins right now, in this year's budget. And he's set himself up for failure if he doesn't bring big changes in our new policy trinity of Health, Energy and Education, or what I lamely think of as HEE-HEE (constant repetition being necessary for the priorities to sink in).