Can Obama Play Offense?

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The Risks of Reasonableness
One day when Obama was young, after a bully stole his friend's soccer ball, his Indonesian stepfather presented him with a pair of boxing gloves and a key instruction: "You want to keep moving, but always stay low. Don't give them a target."

It might as well be his campaign motto. Obama was born in America but raised on its outer boundaries, neither white nor black but both. He's famed for his oratory, but watching him speak, you suspect he leaves about 30% of the emotion on the table, wary of playing the Pentecostal preacher. Physically, he is uncommonly restrained: he keeps his hands close to his head, and his shoulders are always tight and squared. He repeats one mantra to his staff over and over during the insane days and nights of the campaign: "Stay cool. Stay focused. Don't get distracted."

Obama's instincts are often liberal if you look at his votes and his plans, but he is careful not to sound like a liberal. His stump speech is dotted with the Morse code of the middle — assurances that he understands what it is about liberalism that makes nonliberals nervous. He talks about the need to pay for better teachers but also about the responsibility of parents. He can be for "sensible" gun control, like reinstating the assault-weapons ban, but he can also tell Idaho voters, "I've got no intention of taking away people's guns." He says he's against school vouchers but would consider anything that is proven to help kids. His promises of more money for college are often tied to mandatory national service.

But that kind of aggressive reasonableness carries some risk: that he'll be seen as just another pol telling people what they want to hear but lacking any core convictions. That's the charge his political opponents are happy to make, and one the press corps has picked up as well. While Obama takes credit for opposing the Iraq war and warns that it drew America's focus away from Afghanistan, Clinton alleges that he never bothered to use his Subcommittee on European Affairs, which oversees NATO's role there, to hold substantive hearings. The allegation that his senior economic aide told a Canadian consulate official that the candidate didn't really plan to renegotiate NAFTA but was just saying that for political reasons made Obama seem dreadfully ordinary. But so did his initial denial that the two men had ever met. Obama's murky involvement with fund raiser Tony Rezko — and the exact nature of their complicated real estate deal in 2005 involving the Obamas' purchase of their Southside Chicago home — undercuts his claim to be a different kind of politician.

Testing His Reflexes
During the complex debate two years ago over whether President George W. Bush had acted illegally in authorizing a secret domestic-wiretapping program, Cass Sunstein was sitting in his office at the University of Chicago law school when the telephone rang. It was Obama. "I never hear from him on things we agree about," he notes. In a blog posting a few days before, Sunstein had argued that the President might have had a legitimate legal basis for his action. Obama was skeptical.

Sunstein contended that the law authorizing military force in Iraq might have given Bush room to create the program; Obama countered that such a move was ruled out by the FISA law, which made no such provisions for an extralegal runaround. Sunstein maintained that the Constitution's Commander-in-Chief powers probably helped Bush clear that bar; Obama responded that the Supreme Court had not recognized such authority. On and on it went. "I tried not to waste his time," says Sunstein, "but he kept wanting to talk."

Sunstein, a former colleague, concluded that Obama wanted an interlocutor on hard cases, someone to help him chew through the pros and cons before he took a position. "His decision-making process," Sunstein says, "requires him to see the other side's arguments in a sympathetic light so he can say, 'I disagree, but I understand the opposing view.'"

He is the same way on the basketball court. Normally, a teammate notes, Obama sticks tight to his opponents and makes it almost impossible for them to move in any direction. But on Tuesday, Obama hung back more, watching from a safer distance, jogging along before seeing his opportunity to get the ball. Then, though he was hardly the biggest or the quickest man on the floor, he suddenly flashed under the basket, grabbed the rebounds and usually scored.

He will need that speed — and all his other instincts — as his one-on-one with Hillary Clinton enters its final quarter.

The original version of this story incorrectly stated that University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein had "braced" for an argument when Barack Obama called about the FISA law. As he had in other conversations, Professor Sunstein expected a substantive discussion of FISA law when Obama called.