Barack Obama

At Obama's White House, Winston Churchill was sent into retirement, the spotlights were green for the East Room reception on St. Patrick's Day, and the president shot some hoops with the champion women's basketball team from the University of Connecticut. Obama's gestures are different from those of previous presidents--no less political but not quite so conventional. Churchill? He's not universally popular in Britain, for one thing, and Obama may even be aware of that, not that the president has shown much warmth for the United Kingdom--and so the Oval Office bust disappeared. Green lights for Ireland's patron saint? The president is from Chicago, and don't make the mistake of thinking that he's too classy to enjoy a little cheesiness now and then. So the wine was green, too. The hoops? The 47-year-old chief executive sank his shots. The women, in dresses, were sweating.

When Obama answers questions at a press conference, he'll sometimes hold his hands in front of him as if he were in possession of the ball and coolly deciding whether to dribble, pass, or shoot. Then it becomes apparent that what he's really doing is shaping his thought as he speaks. He likes the TelePrompTer, but when he goes off-the-cuff, he makes it sound as though he's thinking through his (paragraph-long) answer instead of searching for the right mental index card. When he digresses from the point that a questioner raised, Obama generally returns to it at the end, like a jazz musician at the close of an extended riff.

The president doesn't do fiery or soaring. He received a grounding in Western culture as a student at Columbia and learned the law at Harvard, and maybe it shows. His big speeches have a substance that may elude you at first. Go back and read his Inaugural Address--it's better than you realized when you heard it on that cold and sunny day.

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