Post-Modern Steel

This Nate Silver post strikes me as about right:

"That does not mean that the Obama that emerges from Lizza's piece is particularly warm and cuddly. He is certainly a very political creature, and there is something a little steely and postmodern about it all. But it is also not clear that Obama is playing some kind of angle. He seems, rather, to hold a lot of fairly mainstream, somewhat empirically-driven views -- still an idealist in certain ways, but not highly ideological. The White House may represent to him some sort of final step in his self-actualization, but he's not going there to get a blow job, or to play out some sort of Oedipal complex. It's all actually sort of ... boring."