Obama has a calm, disciplined approach to challenges

The people who run the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum have been worrying that the last of the FDR aficionados are dying off. But the place was jammed last week, with people of all ages, for the closing days of an exhibit on the tumultuous first 100 days of FDR's presidency. Photographs, newsreels, and everyday objects captured the spirit of crisis that greeted Roosevelt in March 1933: broken banks, evaporated credit, an epidemic of foreclosures. And few, if any, visitors to the museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., missed the pertinence of the display.

Even with Henry Paulson Jr.'s escalating tactics in the current financial crisis, the next president could be facing an FDR moment when he takes office in January. If Barack Obama should be that president, Americans will be wondering if he has the judgment, decisiveness, empathy, and smarts to succeed in the job. Not to mention, to use an old-fashioned word, the moxie that was so central to Roosevelt's appeal.

Obama's conduct -- as an organizer, as a Chicago politician, as a U.S. senator, and as a campaigner on a national stage -- provides more than a few clues. Smart but untested, disciplined but low-key, sure of himself but a careful listener, Obama would bring a measure of calm and consideration to the Oval Office. He can flash a brilliant smile, but he is not -- to use Roosevelt's description of Al Smith -- a happy warrior.

As it was with Roosevelt, voters haven't flocked to Obama because of his campaign proposals. His supporters want to throw the Republicans out, and they see an intangible leadership quality in him. Roosevelt spelled out his philosophy succinctly (and accurately, as it turned out) in a campaign speech he gave at Oglethorpe University in May 1932. "Take a method and try it," he said. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

The voters went for it, on faith. If they elect Obama, that, too, will be on faith. The question is not so much what his positions are, but how he would govern -- and whether he's up to the challenges that the next four years, if not the next four months, are sure to bring.

The Hyde Park exhibit featured the 16 major pieces of legislation as well as the executive orders and proclamations that launched the New Deal in the spring of 1933. The last bill enacted before the summer recess was the Glass-Steagall Banking Act, which remained in force until its repeal in 1999 at the start of the speculative frenzy that has now come crashing down.

The museum's show was reassuring in one sense: The powerful photos of destitute Americans were so wrenching that the current crisis hardly seems a real parallel. A large picture greeted visitors near the beginning of the display, a familiar one of a man in a coat and tie selling apples, "the universal symbol of the Depression," as the exhibit noted. As it happens, apples are one of the big crops in the Hudson Valley, and just now they're coming in by the ton. At a pick-your-own orchard upriver from Hyde Park, customers prowled the rows of fruit trees that afternoon, filling bags -- at $40 a bushel! -- and making uneasy jokes about apples and selling them on street corners.

Adapting Alinsky

Saul Alinsky had a story he liked to tell about Franklin Roosevelt. After a White House meeting with a delegation that was pushing some sort of reform, the president said, "OK, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me!"

Alinsky's point was that change required constant heat. It's easy to see that he also had a certain respect for Roosevelt's wiliness and grasp of what it takes politically to get things done. Alinsky was a legendary activist -- a 1930s radical who hated communists, a prankster, a thorn in the side of the Chicago political machine who laid out the principles of community organizing. His legacy was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which has grown and evolved since his death in 1972.

It was at an IAF training seminar in Los Angeles in 1985 that a would-be organizer named Barack Obama, just 24, got his first taste of Alinsky's thinking.

But community action wasn't the only thing on his mind. Obama learned that one of the instructors, Arnie Graf, who is white, was married to a black woman, and that, at the time, they had two children. (One of them, Alicia Graf, later achieved critical success as a dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.)

Obama and Graf talked for several hours over the course of the 10-day training session about raising biracial children, about connecting them to both sides of their heritage. Obama, of course, had been raised by his white mother and her parents, and he had had only the slightest of connections with his Kenyan father. Graf remembers him as "a young man in a racial identity search."

Obama peppered him with questions that were straightforward without being blunt. Graf, who lives in Columbia, Md., a community designed in the 1960s to attract all races, religions, and income levels, told Obama about taking the kids down to their grandparents' farm in North Carolina every summer. His children, he said, were "internally integrated -- they were growing up knowing each side of themselves." Obama was still looking for one side of himself. Another IAF instructor suggested to him that he go to Kenya to find his father's family, a trip that he may have already been thinking about.

The Grafs' son later played basketball at Kenyon College, and, his father recalls, faced the problem of choosing where to eat in the cafeteria, at the black table or a white one. To live as a biracial person is to be a bridge between two cultures, two worlds. Or else, be angry.

Obama didn't go for anger. Maybe this explains his relative lack of success as a community organizer. You have to create tension, Alinsky taught, and use it. You have to rub raw the sores of society. You can't try to see the other side's perspective. You have to believe you're 100 percent in the right. You can't be a bridge.

Obama didn't fit that mold. But there was much about the IAF training that clearly appealed to him. Alinsky saw power as a zero-sum game, and he believed quite forthrightly that the end could justify the means. But after his death, the organization began to think of power in a different light, as "relational" rather than "dominant." Obama, Graf says, was drawn to a deepening understanding of self-interest -- that it could be concerned with finding identity, or with taking part in something larger than yourself, as suggested by the writings of Christian theologian Paul Tillich. There is the world as it is, which has to do with power and the ability to take action -- and the world as it should be, which comes down to love. "The bridge between power and love," Graf says, "is justice."

The bridge, again. Graf says that Obama seemed to be inspired by the intellectual side of the training but he wasn't comfortable with confrontation. "You've got to get into the hard work of justice," Graf says, "and you don't get justice without disruption." Obama understood that, but he wasn't taking it to heart.

He told Graf that he wanted to do organizing for a few years, then go to law school and eventually start a civil-rights practice. The IAF offered him a position, but he wanted to stay in Chicago, where the foundation no longer had an affiliate. So Obama worked for three years for the Developing Communities Project on Chicago's South Side. Then, as planned, he went to law school. But instead of practicing civil-rights law, he went into politics.

"The worry that I would have," says Graf, thinking back to the young man he met nearly a quarter-century ago, "is not just, is he too deliberative, but does he think he can sit down with people and not deal with the tension?"

Channeling Alinsky, Graf wonders whether Obama is ruthless enough.

Beyond Rhetoric

That might not be the right question, however. Former Rep.Abner Mikva, who was a federal judge in between stints in the Carter and Clinton administrations, has known Obama since the young man returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School. Mikva tried to interest Obama in a clerkship, but by then the new lawyer had set his sights on a political career.

Obama's forte, Mikva says, is solving problems, not drawing lines in the sand. He always got along well with the Republicans in Springfield, because, Mikva says, "he never put them down." Ruthlessness was not his style.

But what about in Washington? Could a President Obama deal with, say, an uncooperative and hostile Russia? Again, Mikva argues, ruthlessness or tension-building or anger aren't necessarily virtues in such a situation. "You can't threaten to nuke 'em. You can't nuke 'em. You can't send in the troops." And there's a limit to how much you can bluster, which more often than not enhances the standing of the other side.

Obama's interest in finding solutions to problems, Mikva contends, shouldn't be confused with indecisiveness or softness. Looking for fights to pick isn't the only way to get things done.

And Obama learns from experience, according to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. He was impressed with the way Obama changed after losing a race for Congress in 2000, in part by seeking advice. "You learn from defeat," Daley says. "Some people don't learn from defeat. They go away mad and mean and upset with a lot of people. But, again, he came away in a positive way."

Since that defeat, Obama has learned how to inspire voters and galvanize supporters. "He's proven that he's got a vision of leadership," says Lissa Muscatine, a senior adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. "But what's less known about him is how he will actually exercise the levers of government and operate the machinery of government."

Would the attributes that have served him so well in the campaign, in other words, translate into a capacity to be a hands-on president?

Obama, of course, actually has more Washington experience than did Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or any of the other governors who ascended to the presidency over the past 32 years. Unlike a governor, he won't bring his own "mafia" to Washington from the state capital, and that might smooth his relations with Congress and the federal bureaucracy. "He has a way of attracting good people and getting good work out of them," Mikva says.

Obama's role as president would be to concentrate on the big picture, in Mikva's view, and be a "cheerleader to get us to go in the right direction."

No one disputes that the senator from Illinois has the rhetorical skills that he needs. The groundswell of support for Obama, late last year and over the winter, was the result in no small part of his eloquence on the stump. Millions of voters began to hope that he offered a departure in American politics, based on inspiration and vision rather than on scheming and attacking. He held out the promise that he could be the Democrats' Ronald Reagan.

He has toned down his rhetoric since his March speech in Philadelphia on race, but no one doubts that he could turn it on whenever he felt called upon to do so.

It's not entirely accurate, though, to think of Obama as all vision and no nuts-and-bolts. He's not like Clinton, who loved to engage in back-and-forth policy debates when he was president, Mikva says. But he weighs in. For starters, Obama lets those around him have their say, and he listens without tipping his hand. "You get more views put on the table that way," Mikva says. "He doesn't brush off ideas. He knows how to listen -- and you've been around politicians long enough to know that's not a trait they usually have." But then he makes a decision and sticks with it.

Obama, says Mark Lippert, a senior foreign-policy adviser to the campaign, "recognizes the need for a tight chain of command. You cannot have too many lines in to the candidate. But at the same time, key challenges are not to be walled off from the complexities and realities of an issue, and [it's important] to prevent group-think."

So he reads from an array of sources, Lippert says, and seeks out people, including some who disagree with him, to get their views on significant issues. Last summer, Obama met with a group of junior officers who had just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan to get their impressions on the war.

Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, is a member of Obama's transition planning team. He describes Obama as open, inclusive, flexible, and disciplined. And "finite," by which he means that Obama doesn't let policy discussions drag on inconclusively. "I've seen him insist on completion."

Although Obama won't go looking for fights, Daschle says, he won't shy away from them, either. "He will certainly fight for the things he cares about deeply, and fight hard. That's not his first choice, but he will do it should the need arise." And fighting, Daschle notes, doesn't have to mean getting in the face of your opponent. As president, Obama would use a panoply of tools to advance his causes.

Discipline is one of those tools, if his campaign is any measure. Mikva worked on Obama's Senate run in 2004, and the ethos, he says, came down to this: "We're not here to bicker with each other. We're not here to fuss with each other. We've got a job to do."

Yet his campaign organization is not top-down. Alinsky said that change has to come from the bottom up, that people have to want change before it can happen, and that's one lesson that Obama has put to use. His organizers spent the spring and summer finding and training volunteers, and then testing them and training them some more. Volunteers are expected to recruit more volunteers. Neighborhood leaders are trusted to do what they have to, and there's not only a delegation of responsibility but also an avenue (an imperfect one) for information to filter up through the organization.

There's room for creativity, says one volunteer in Toledo, Ohio, who asked that she not be identified because she is not supposed to talk to reporters. And everyone is interested in hearing others' ideas. ("I'm sure I sound like I drank the Kool-Aid!" she adds.) The volunteers are grouped into "turfs" -- there's the "urban-persuasion" turf, the "urban-base" turf, the "rural-persuasion" turf, and so on.

It's a formidable organization, and to the extent that it helps Obama win the election, if he does, it could have formidable ramifications. It would make any opponent think twice about challenging Obama, and it would have earned the gratitude of insurgent Democrats winning seats in Congress. On top of that, it will have taught thousands of Obama supporters the rudiments of organizing.

School Control

When Art Berman first got to know Obama, he was impressed with the freshman legislator's "determination to learn." That was in Springfield in 1996, and the two state senators from Chicago were of like mind on any number of issues, especially education. Obama struck Berman, now retired after 30 years in the Legislature, as someone who wanted to reach out. As president, Berman says, "he will do what he has to for the United States. He will step up to the challenge."

But that may depend on what Obama believes to be a challenge. In 1995, for instance, the head of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation recruited him to be president and chairman of a new organization called, misleadingly perhaps, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. This gave him an oversight role that encompassed the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, and thus a working link to William Ayers, who was one of the collaborative's principal leaders.

Much has been written about Obama and Ayers, but little about what the Annenberg Challenge accomplished in its six years. The short answer, by the organization's own reckoning: next to nothing. With $49 million from conservative philanthropist Walter Annenberg, matched by funds from local foundations and the city of Chicago, the Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, partnered with certain schools and achieved no discernible improvement in test scores, although it took away some potentially valuable lessons about what doesn't work.

It's clear that the staff ran the CAC and that the board had barely more than a ceremonial role. In 1999, a controversy erupted in Chicago over the power of local school councils, which had the strong backing of the CAC but had run afoul of Paul Vallas, the city school CEO. The fight, which had to do with decentralization versus accountability, was eventually settled with legislation, sponsored by Berman; Obama took no stand until the legislation was on its way to adoption, and Vallas and Berman agree that he played no role behind the scenes.

Given the idea that change must come from the bottom up, it was natural for the CAC to support the local councils. Should its charismatic young chairman have entered the fray? Obama, in fact, had his state Senate district to worry about. Control of the schools in Chicago was something of a perennial issue, and not a very rewarding one for those not directly involved. Vallas, who is now CEO of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, suspects that Obama had come to realize that accountability was important, and had decided against "demagoguing" the issue of local control.

Berman says of the CAC: "They were always advocates, but a step behind the loudest voices. They didn't have the resources of others." The grandly named Chicago Annenberg Challenge eventually expired, unlamented, under a different board leader.

It's 3 a.m.

An enduring phrase from this year's long presidential campaign popped up in February, courtesy of a TV ad from the Clinton campaign: "the 3 a.m. phone call." The phrase found traction because it raised a real concern among many voters about Obama's readiness. Half of that concern had to do with whether the next president would have a basic grounding in the specific conditions in any number of hot spots.

If the chief executive were to be awakened at 3 a.m. with a report that, say, the Russians were blockading Latvia, the obvious first questions would be: Is this a military blockade? What about the oil terminal? Is the large ethnic Russian minority in Latvia playing a role? What are NATO's obligations? Are our satellites giving good data? What are the (ostensibly) neutral Swedes reporting from their vantage point across the Baltic? What about Estonia? Lithuania?

But any administration should have people who can supply those questions -- and, one would hope, the answers -- on short notice. The Obama campaign has 300 foreign-policy advisers. The other half of the 3 a.m. concern has to do with the president's courage, steadiness, and clear-headedness. In this respect, the question about the 3 a.m. phone call is an updating of a quality that Napoleon said he wanted in his generals -- "2 o'clock-in-the-morning courage." It's a quality that has been explicitly associated with one former U.S. president, though not one whose memory Obama would probably want to invoke.

That was Ulysses S. Grant. During the Civil War, he earned the respect of his troops by "keeping his composure even in those moments in the middle of the night when fears could often overpower lesser commanders," as the official American Military History puts it. (Grant's courage was typically moved forward an hour from Napoleonic standard time, to 3 a.m., or even, in historian Shelby Foote's telling, to 4 a.m.)

Grant fell asleep under a tree, in the rain, after the first day of the battle of Shiloh, says William S. McFeely, who wrote a Pulitzer-prize winning biography of him. Early the next morning, he woke up and turned a rout into a victory.

"He was wonderfully in command, just exactly the kind of coolness we would want in Obama," McFeely says.

But it was war that stimulated Grant, not politics. His personal courage did him little good once he was in the White House. Grant's first crisis as president unfolded as two New York financiers tried to corner the gold market. He was slow to move, partly because his brother-in-law was involved in the scheme. Finally, when the stock market crashed on Black Friday, September 24, 1869, the government intervened, after millions of dollars had been lost.

"And the '3 a.m. phone call' he didn't take," McFeely says, "was the terrible guerrilla war against black people in the South."

As president, Grant had a limited attention span at best. "He was calm and collected, but being calm and collected is not the same as being effective." McFeely suggests that the two presidents who showed genuine 3 a.m. courage in office were Abraham Lincoln -- "he didn't panic; in the end he got around to doing what he needed to do" -- and John Kennedy, who chose not to act on the advice he was getting to invade Cuba after Soviet missiles were spotted there.

Daschle argues that the current Wall Street debacle has been Obama's first 3 a.m. moment. Unlike John McCain, whom Daschle described as "frenzied, erratic, inexplicable," he says that Obama's calmness over the past month is "exactly the kind of demeanor we need. I think it's illustrative of how he will handle future crises."

He displays a quick understanding but doesn't rush to judgment, Mikva says. "Obama's is exactly the right temperament to have. He doesn't say maybe, or let me think about this more. He's just not a hip-shooter."

Under Wraps

The emblem of the village of Hyde Park, N.Y., is an unmistakable silhouette of a man in profile, with that cigarette holder pointed jauntily upward, as if to a better future. Obama and FDR -- different in background, experience, political instinct -- are perhaps least alike in their evident enthusiasm for the life of a politician.

FDR gave the impression that nothing gave him a bigger kick than being in the White House, except maybe being out among his fellow Americans. Even when he went on the offensive, he had a twinkle in his eye and a tone in his voice that let you know he was having fun. "These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them." And so on.

Grim isn't the right way to describe Obama's campaign, but determined and no-nonsense come close. Even the flamboyant David Axelrod, his chief strategist, seems to be under wraps. "We've got a job to do," as Mikva said.

Vice presidential nominee Joe Biden projects a certain Rooseveltian insouciance, and he's unlikely to stay bottled up. But even though he would be crucial in helping a young President Obama deal with the intricacies and baronies of Congress, he wouldn't be setting the tone at the White House. That comes from the top.

Some candidates have grown in stature after they've assumed the presidency. They've found a footing and risen to fill the job, to meet the intangible expectations of national leadership. It involves what might be called magnanimity of spirit. Americans could see it happening with both Reagan and Bill Clinton. (It's not a question of ideology.) It certainly happened with FDR, who struck many in the election year of 1932 as an amiable candidate with his heart in the right place, but not exactly a heavyweight.

It's too soon to hazard a guess about Obama. As he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." That's a valuable asset for an ambitious politician with no lack of self-confidence. But once in the White House, he would have to start illuminating that screen himself.

Smart, calm, disciplined, steady, careful -- with an inclination to try to solve problems, and not, in the Bush vein, to create his own reality -- Obama the candidate is a foreshadowing of Obama the president. But the full picture of who he is wouldn't come into focus until he attained the presidency, because only then would that picture start to become complete.