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 With a year-and-a-half left in office, Obama is shedding some of
his trademark “no drama” style for a looser approach, admitting that
he feels more fearless and liberated.
It may also be in recognition that he has few big-ticket policy
achievements left to enjoy in polarized Washington as the end of his
two-term presidency approaches.
In a remarkable week for the president, a victory on Pacific Rim
trade was snatched from the jaws of defeat on Capitol Hill on
Wednesday. The Supreme Court on Thursday validated his signature
healthcare law, guaranteeing he would accomplish a central
second-term goal, to protect the 2010 Affordable Care Act from being
dismantled by Republicans.
The icing on the cake came on Friday with the high court’s decision
to legalize same-sex marriage, a move Obama said was a "big step"
toward equality for Americans.
After the court decision was announced, Obama took a Rose Garden
victory lap.
“Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes
two steps forward, one step back," he said.
"And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady
effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”
Some Obama confidants described a more liberated, even feistier
president, willing to mix it up with a heckler inside the White
House, as he did on Wednesday. Or willing to use a racial epithet,
long abandoned by civil society, to describe black people in urging
more racial unity.
Why the change in style? He has more experience now, the president
said in a podcast interview last week with comedian Marc Maron.
"Part of that fearlessness is because you’ve screwed up enough times
that it’s all happened. I’ve been through this, I’ve screwed up.
I’ve been in the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls and I emerged
and I lived … That’s such a liberating feeling," he said.
'A LITTLE FREER'
Norman Eisen, a former White House counsel to Obama and former U.S.
ambassador to the Czech Republic, said the president "feels a little
freer now ... to let his heart show publicly."
Eisen has known Obama for almost three decades and maintains that
the president's "core is the same." But on subjects he cares deeply
about, including race, Eisen said Obama is displaying more of his
emotions.
Obama’s speech on Friday in tribute to nine African-Americans killed
by a white gunman in Charleston, S.C., was what the black community
has wanted to hear from him for years.
This was not simply Obama as healer-in-chief, but a call to action
from the president to end racial insensitivities.
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“For too long we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag
stirred in too many of our citizens,” he said in a message aimed
squarely at white Americans.
Senator Dick Durbin got to know Obama well when the future president
was elected to the Senate in 2004 and they both represented
Illinois. Durbin was one of the first national
politicians to embrace Obama's 2008 White House campaign.
"You've seen a much more forceful president in the last few
months on many issues," Durbin said in an interview, adding it was
largely because Obama gave up trying to win over Republicans in
Congress with his signature cool-headed reserve.
Except for bonding with Republicans on trade in recent weeks, "he's
just had to try to devise ways to reach his goals without bipartisan
support of Congress," Durbin said.
Republican lawmakers see things differently, describing a president
they say refused to build personal relationships. Often, they said,
they left White House meetings feeling as if they were lectured by a
chief executive who just wanted to "check off the box" that he met
with them.
And he angered many of his Democratic allies too by forging ahead on
the free-trade pact.
Where Obama goes from here is unclear. Negotiations over Iran’s
nuclear program could result in a deal or could fall apart. Russian
aggression against Ukraine continues, and the West’s fight against
Islamic extremism is uneven at best.
His long-desired bid for tax reform looks unlikely at this point as
the country’s attention turns to the campaign to find a successor to
him in 2016.
But for one week at least, Obama had memories of achievements to
last a lifetime.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan, Roberta Rampton and Steve Holland;
Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Howard Goller and Stuart Grudgings)
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