The Writer

Suderman ponders the bookworm-in-chief:

Bush always seemed to think of leadership as akin to sports focus, endure, keep your energy up, and will away any potential obstacles. Obama, I would guess, will treat it as a complex, perhaps philosophical, piece of fiction, and he will likely want to shape it into something he finds both elegant and true. Of course, I suspect that most every American president sees themselves as the hero of their own story, though what type of story that is varies.  Bush seemed to think he was in an old war movie; Nixon in a paranoid thriller; Reagan, a global-scale western; Clinton, a serio-comic legal farce.  What story Obama believes he is at the center of will, in part, determine how he leads and how he governs. And for both his sake and the nation’s, I hope that it is a story that requires struggle but not failure, intellect but not confusion, ambiguity but not despair a story that is not just subtly hopeful, in that coy literary way, but genuinely successful.