Vanity Fair's recent piece,
"Obama the Loner" offers a look at the hermetic style of 44's tenure and how it has made it harder for him to accomplish his agenda.
Obama's detachment from his aides and willingness to delegate arguably hurt him most with the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the signature achievement of his presidency. And in a weird way, it's created a dynamic very similar to that of the Reagan White House - a detached, isolated president who is extremely close to his wife and a handful of friends, who lets outsized personalities roam the halls of power more or less doing as they please in his stead. In Reagan's time, the
eminences grises were James Baker, Ed Meese and Donald Regan. In Obama's, they have been Biden, Hillary Clinton (and at times, even her husband), Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder.
In a Washington that had already lost a lot of its collegiality by the time Obama took office, he has only furthered the stifling of rapport among the parties and between Congress and the White House...
Then, there is his inability to exercise influence within his own party. The Democratic caucus has held itself together remarkably better in recent years than the Republicans, whose Hamas and Fatah wings are in a state of constant war. But all of this has been the work of Pelosi and Reid, not of the President.
If, as some Obama critics have argued, America voted for the president in 2008 because they were more entranced with the "idea" of an Obama presidency than they were with the actual execution of one, Obama has presented himself to the very people in positions to help him as little more than an idea, and one that they have little means of grasping.
Obama's lousy "donor maintenance" especially when compared to the glad-handing, back-slapping Clintons, was on full display during 2012. And if it bruises the egos of a few wealthy people, the real harm is done to Obama himself, who forfeits the opportunity to get to know people who are genuinely interested in helping him and who offer him something he lacks. Obama's lack of understanding of the "private sector" isn't simply a chunk of Republican red meat; it's a fact. That doesn't make him a red flag-waving Marxist, but it does mean he lacks a significant understanding of the individuals and firms he is crafting laws to impact. And when he fails to forge meaningful relationships with the liberal and Democratic elements of the business community, it hurts his already dim reputation in the business community as a whole.
History is full of leaders who have been ruined by the behavior Obama has engaged in during his presidency. Jimmy Carter went to the White House pitching himself as an Everyman untainted by the dirtiness of Washington politics-as-usual; but his aloof detachment from Congress and the powers that be resulted in a single term with no major policy achievements and a failed coup from within his own party. Texas governor Dolph Briscoe was elected in 1972 as a reformer in the wake of major scandals in the previous administration, but his preference for isolating himself at his ranch and maintaining a state of civil indifference to the Legislature made his legacy that of an inconsequential placeholder rather than a reformer and a restorer of trust. Outside of politics, one has to wonder if Enron would have collapsed as spectacularly as it did had CEO Ken Lay been more engaged in the day-to-day operations of the company he was supposed to lead, rather than cloistering himself in his office in a manner more suitable to his previous career as an economics professor.
