Robert Draper, chronicler of the Last Days of Bush, has another very interesting piece in GQ this month, this time looking at Barack Obama the writer and how the President’s writing shapes and informs his style. Andrew Sullivan rightly highlights the part that deals with the famous “race speech” in Philadelphia last year, but I was struck by a couple of other passages that help, I think, explain Obama’s enigmatic, still-up-for-grabs Presidency.
Draper’s thess is that Obama is the first writer to occupy the White House since Teddy Roosevelt. There’s something to that and if you think that something has nothing to do with how aspiring-writers journalists view the President you’d be wrong. Draper quotes David Axelrod saying that one of the things,
We’ll get to this in a moment. Consider too, this passage from Draper’s article:“I’ve always appreciated about him [is] his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it.”
As readers of Dreams from My Father are aware, Obama’s personal story is a good one.
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