Free The Amateur by Edward Klein

earmarks—the notorious legislative gimmick used by congressmen and senators to allocate funds for favorite projects in their home districts. Yet, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent an omnibus spending bill with $8 billion worth of earmarks to the White House, Obama naïvely believed Pelosi and Reid, who told him that that was the only way he could get his $800 billion stimulus bill passed. Obama signed the omnibus spending bill with all the earmarks intact, signaling that the barons of Capitol Hill could roll the amateurish president.
    For a long time, some people—especially those in the liberal mainstream media—thought that Obama would somehow make up for what he lacked in experience with his oratorical skills. Liberals considered Obama to be a great communicator—right up there with such masters as Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
    Not anymore.
    Most of his recent speeches have fallen flat. Americans have tuned him out. His 2012 State of the Union address was seen by 37.8 million television viewers—down from the 52.3 million people who tuned in to his first address to Congress in 2009. As
    Maureen Dowd noted in the New York Times : “[Bill] Clinton will often forcefully—and feelingly—frame the argument for Obama policies... in a way that Obama himself, once hailed as a master communicator, can’t seem to muster.”

    Other presidents have entered the White House as amateurs. John F. Kennedy immediately comes to mind. JFK stumbled badly during his first year in office; the Bay of Pigs calamity was only the most notable of his many mistakes. But he grew in the job and was well on his way to becoming an effective chief executive when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas.
    So why hasn’t Obama grown in the job?
    There are several answers to that question, which we will explore in depth in the pages that follow. But for now, the short answer is:
    Barack Obama has the wrong temperament for the presidency.
    Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said about Franklin Roosevelt that he had a “second class mind, but a first class temperament.” The opposite is true of Barack Obama, who for all his academic credentials is not cut out by temperament to be the leader of the free world.
    By all accounts, Obama was elected to a job for which he has little relish. He doesn’t find joy in being president. Like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, he is an introvert who prefers his own company to that of others. The Times’ Peter Baker puts it this way: Obama is “someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him.... While [Bill] Clinton made late-night phone calls around Washington to vent or seek advice, Obama rarely reaches outside the tight groups of advisers.”
    “I’ve been in a lot of meetings with him on foreign policy,” a former State Department official told me. “While I was in the room, he’d get phone calls from heads of state, and more than once I heard him say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve got to meet with all these congressmen from Podunk city to get my bills passed.’ And when the meeting with him was over, it was over—no lingering, no schmoozing on the way out. There was no clinging to personal relationship like with Bill Clinton.”
    In his study of the presidency, Hail to the Chief, historian Robert Dallek lists five qualities that have been constants in the men who have most effectively fulfilled the oath of office: 1) vision; 2) political pragmatism; 3) national consensus; 4) personal connection with the people; and 5) credibility.
    Dallek places the greatest emphasis on numbers 4 and 5. “The best of our presidents,” he writes, “have always recognized that leadership required a personal connection between the president