The new Obama

AFTER the second debate between US President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, Obama's supporters chorused in near-unison, "He's back!". The languid, disengaged, and lackluster performer of the first debate had disappeared, and the impressive, beloved figure of the victorious 2008 campaign had reappeared. As the commentator Andrew Sullivan put it, "I saw the person I first saw...I saw the president I thought I knew."

To my eye, however, the old Obama was not back. A new Obama had appeared. The old Obama was youthful, charming, graceful, and full of hope. His demeanour was crisp yet easygoing. His rhetoric soared. His smile could light up a stadium.

The Obama on display in the second debate and the third was harder, chillier, sadder, and more somber. There was tension in the lines of his mouth. His speech was clipped, as if under continuous rigorous control. His rhetoric did not soar, could not soar. The smile was rare and constrained.

But his command of detail and argument was rock solid. His sentences parsed. He spoke with a cold, disciplined energy. In repose (as witnessed on the split screen in the reaction shots) he was often perfectly immobile, almost stony, as if posing for a portrait.

One word for all of this would be "presidential," in the sense of competent, seasoned, and sobered by reality. But that word also connotes the fearsome qualities of ruthlessness and brutality that any honest portrayal of the office of President of the United States must include in our day. Obama has inhabited the White House for four years; now the White House inhabits him.

Twice this autumn, Obama had already performed before tens of millions of people in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention and in the first debate.

Each time, his performance was flat. At the convention, he seemingly hoped to summon the old Obama, to charm and soar, but that man was simply no longer available.

The truth appears to be that his muse deserted him sometime in the first year of his presidency. The result was a simulacrum of the old Obama, as if he were acting the part of himself.

Then, in the first debate, no such futile effort was even made, and there was no Obama at all, neither old nor new. As so many commentators noted, in some sense he simply failed to show up. Perhaps he also thought that, well ahead in the polls, he did not have to bother to engage the pesky fellow who imagined replacing him in the White House.

At the second debate, the loss of the old Obama was apparently accepted and a new one existing, real, available, and now working in the Oval Office made its first appearance.

Has the presidency hardened Obama? Has it brutalized him? There are reasons for thinking that it has.

First, Obama has taken, perhaps, a heavier beating from his political opposition than most presidents. The theme of Obama's life, clearly expressed in his eloquent memoir Dreams from My Father, and shown in the recent Frontline documentary The Choice, is reconciliation. He is not a man whose identity was handed to him by birth. Born of a white mother and an absentee Kenyan father, residing in Indonesia as a boy, raised in adolescence by a white single mother in Hawaii, he was forced to figure out his place in life on his own. He found it in the idea of reconciliation both racial and ideological.