The Elusive Presidency of Barack Obama

Every president, as he celebrates his first holiday season in the White House, retains a capacity to surprise.

At this point in 2001, with the nation united in its grief over the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush had yet to display the cocksure recklessness that led to the ill-fated invasion of Iraq. Bill Clinton -- no stranger to cocksure recklessness -- had yet to transform himself into a small-deeds moderate who bequeathed his successor a balanced budget. And Ronald Reagan, seen by friend and foe alike as an inflexible ideologue in late 1981, had yet to unveil the surprising suppleness that produced the 1982 tax increase and the partnership with Mikhail Gorbachev to defuse the Cold War.

But Barack Obama came into office as a different kind of president. Millions of rapturous supporters believed that they knew him in a way that transcended politics because of the unparalleled intimacy of his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," and his rhetorical ability to become the embodiment of wish fulfillment. I recall friends -- besotted with Obama -- describing Election Night 2008 as the best night of their lives, which said something about their romantic history.

This irrational exuberance was, of course, unsustainable. But it helps explain why the Obama administration is disappointing many Democrats, even though the president is poised to pass health care reform, has avoided any major foreign policy setbacks, and has not had to endure a debilitating White House scandal. For all the liberal anguish over Obama's new Afghan policy and the death of the public option in the Senate health care bill, these presidential shifts in direction were not explicit violations of campaign promises. Yet the sense of letdown remains evident. It is as if Obama betrayed his most ardent acolytes by governing as a competent Clark Kent rather than leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

For all the campaign talk of transparency, the Obama White House is, at best, translucent and often opaque. An unheralded but politically significant accomplishment is Obama's success in imposing Republican-style loose-lips-sink-ships discipline on normally garrulous Democrats. Sure there have been press leaks, most notably the disclosure by The Washington Post of General Stanley McChrystal's blunt assessment of the "deteriorating" situation in Afghanistan and his demand for more troops. But for the most part, Obama is either presiding over the most boring White House in human history or else he has been adroit in keeping internal doubts and divisions out of the headlines.

Nothing will remain hidden forever -- if the publishing industry has anything to say about it. With all the book contracts handed out around Inauguration Day to top reporters promising to provide inside-the-Oval-Office accounts of Obama's first day, first month or first year in the White House, we will soon be reading endless variations of this kind of breathless journalism: "Rahm Emanuel was enraged. The White House chief of staff hurled 12-letter compound words like thunderbolts and angrily threatened to personally administer punishments far more permanent than waterboarding." Coming later will be the lucrative White House memoirs and the inevitable "if only he had listened to me" laments of marginalized Obama advisers. Already, investment banker Steve Rattner, who played a central role in the auto bailouts as a Treasury Department advise, has written an article for Fortune describing the negotiations to save GM and Chrysler, which he is now expanding into a book.

For the moment, though, this is still a White House shrouded in bubble wrap. Even though Obama dominates the TV screens and news headlines, there are surprising gaps in our knowledge of his 11-month presidency. An illustration: Obama has been elusive from the beginning in detailing the minimum that he would accept in a health care bill. (Cynics suggest that Obama would have gleefully signed any bill whatsoever that emerged from Congress -- and declared it to be an epic victory.) While this never-show-your-cards vagueness may have been an adroit legislative strategy, it makes it more difficult to assess the success of the Senate bill. Is the legislation about what the president expected since it resembles the plan that Obama ballyhooed in the fall campaign? Or did the White House secretly hope to do better in terms of cost control, subsidy levels and, yes, a public entity to compete with insurance companies?

More questions linger on the economic front. Did Obama and his top advisers actually believe that the $787 billion stimulus package that Congress approved in February was large enough to bring down the unemployment rate -- or did they grudgingly accept it as the best deal that they could get? If this was partly a political calculation, do Obama and Company now regret (with unemployment at 10 percent and the recovery lagging) their failure to push the Democratic congressional leadership harder on the stimulus?

The most baffling aspect of Obama economics has been the president's palpable reluctance, even now, to demonize Wall Street and the avarice of the bonus culture. Sure, Obama has appointed a powerless compensation czar and periodically voices his disapproval of the sudden bout of amnesia (remember the global economic meltdown?) in the financial community. But there remains a persistent sense that the president instinctively recoils at even a hint of populist theatrics. Does Obama believe that Wall Street is so beyond shame that it is futile to try to change the risky business culture of the trading floor? Does the president emotionally understand the anger that bitter voters in small towns and large cities feel about the Masters of the Universe who heedlessly triggered the worst economic crisis of their lives? Or if Obama can't get mad, can he, at least, get even?

The biggest question about the Obama presidency, though, will probably have to wait for the memoirs and biographies as well as the loosened tongues of loyalists when the president has left the White House. Did Obama the Unflappable ever feel like Obama the Daunted as he sat in the Oval Office contemplating the crises that he inherited?

Obama came into office with the briefest national political resume of any modern president, aside from Jimmy Carter. Harry Truman, who had spent a decade in the Senate before he became president in 1945, said after the death of FDR, "I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me."

Did Obama, just four years removed from the Illinois state senate, feel the same way as he contemplated waging two wars and rescuing an economy teetering on the abyss? Or is Obama's self-confidence so entwined with his personality that he is incapable of imagining failure? After 11 months in office, Barack Obama remains -- more than any president in memory -- an enigmatic figure who defies easy categorization.

Such are the mysteries of the Oval Office.