Here's David Brooks today:
Barack Obama is the most
split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand,
there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who
spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling
the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast
Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw
you under the truck for votes. [Emphasis added.]
Here's David Brooks this past winter:
Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure
outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his
own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that
is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once
he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.
[snip]
Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not
lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of
this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the
strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther
King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as
a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties
of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs
between the good and bad within each individual.
I don't think Johansson was the only one feeling the fierce urgency of now.
--Jason Zengerle