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and I think he embodies that. But the second thing that I admire most in Lincoln is that there is just a deep-rooted honesty and empathy to the man that allowed him to always be able to see the other person’s point of view and always sought to find that truth that is in the gap between you and me. Right? That the truth is out there somewhere and I don’t fully possess it and you don’t fully possess it and our job then is to listen and learn and imagine enough to be able to get to that truth. If you look at his presidency, he never lost that. Most of our other great presidents, there was that sense of working the angles and bending other people to their will—FDR being the classic example. And Lincoln just found a way to shape public opinion and shape people around him and lead them and guide them without tricking them or bullying them, but just through the force of what I just talked about—that way of helping to illuminate the truth. I just find that to be a very compelling style of leadership. It’s not one that I’ve mastered, but I think that’s when leadership is at its best.”
    Someone who worked in the Obama White House during the first term made a related observation about Obama and Lincoln, which went to the question of both Obama’s ideology and his leadership style. He explained it this way: “His relationship with our left is no different than Lincoln’s relationship with the radical Republicans who thought that Lincoln was too cautious, that he wasn’t going for it in the Civil War, that he wasn’t doing the things that he really needed to do to win the Civil War, that he wasn’t moving fast enough on emancipation, that he was too cautious, that he was too this and too that. We look back in history and think of Lincoln as one of our great risk-taking, transformational presidents. But in the context of politics in his time he was seen as very much trying to stay in the middle.”
    Those who observed Obama from close in had other views about his ideology and leadership style. They said that whatever doubts the left might have about Obama, he was not a centrist in Bill Clinton’s mold (although by now the two agreed on most issues). Obama saw no particular virtue in planting his flag in the middle or in finding compromises that somehow split the differences between left and right. Triangulation for triangulation’s sake was not a strategythat interested him. He was, they believed, fundamentally progressive in his outlook, motivated most by social and economic justice, though more a cool rationalist than a bleeding heart. Obama himself resisted labels and characterizations. He objected when columnists suggested at different points in his presidency either that he was moving to the center or that he had found his inner populist. Obama saw consistency in his views and his approach.
    If he had a weakness, some of those who watched him closely said, it was for smart people, the belief that if you could just get enough smart people in a room, they could figure out a solution to whatever the problem was and the public would accept it. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, upon leaving the administration, pointed to Vice President Joe Biden as one member of the administration who saw the limits of that approach: “I loved watching you, in briefings with the economic team, often in disbelief, saying, ‘Where did you people come from? And have you ever been exposed to the real world in any way?’” Democrats who knew both Obama and Clinton said Obama was less likely to change course simply because of the political risks involved. Compared with Clinton, however, he had less capacity to put himself in the minds of his opponents, to understand where they were coming from and why, or to channel their point of view as a way to figure out how to negotiate with them successfully.
    What was harder to decipher was just how expansive his vision for government action was or should be—particularly if he was