Getting Under Obama's Skin

Larissa MacFarquhar does an apt and artful deconstruction of Barack Obama's political persona in this week's New Yorker. Observing the candidate's oddly mild stump style, compared with the overachiever affect of most Democratic candidates, she notes that he is less professor than doctor, aiming not to whip up outrage but to heal the body politic.

Obama comes by his cool conciliatory style naturally, she writes, as a child who synthesized cultures to construct an identity.  With an almost eery self-possession—"the unnnatural stillness of someone able to lower his blood pressure at will"—he shares Lincoln 's  profound pragmatism, his understanding of unity as compromise, of the certainty of uncertainty. (More Barack Obama stories.)