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“I also have to say, one of the great thrills is to watch him work on a speech. It’s not just the content—he’s very focused on that—but more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, he’s focused on the rhythm of the words. Like, he’ll invert words. He’ll say, ‘I need a one-beat word here.’ There’s no question who the best writer in the [speech-writing] group is.”

Axelrod, of course, is expected to extol his boss’s virtues, literary or otherwise. But Obama’s subordinates are not the only ones who view him this way. Recently, I had lunch with one of the nation’s leading conservative journalists. He had spent time with the president, and although he could find little to admire about the man ideologically, he also observed that there was simply no contest between Obama and George W. Bush when it came to the thoughtful evocation of images and ideas.

“He’s like us,” he said. “He’s a writer.”

That this journalist of the right would feel a kinship with the Democratic president suggests that the media’s affection for Obama may have less to do with ideology than is commonly supposed. As readers of Dreams from My Father are aware, Obama’s personal story is a good one. And as the writer of that story, Obama is more attuned to the power of narrative and is more in control of it than any president in recent memory. Yet this same attention to narrative can also seem the source of Obama’s psychological and political shortcomings; they are the writer’s classic failings. The story that obsesses him is his own story: He tells it over and over, stamping it into the larger American narrative and often conflating the two, a feat of authorial arrogance that’s simultaneously an outsider’s plaintive quest for belonging. In the telling, he shades and edits as a writer does, employing straw-man characters (those who would rather do nothing than fix the economy; the villainous Bush administration) to set a backdrop for his own heroic odyssey. Most perilously, Obama believes more strongly in the magic of words, especially his own, than perhaps any of his recent predecessors. His default option is to give a speech, and he’s maybe too prolific at doing so, since a disproportion of words to deeds is what ultimately undermines a politician.

But to the Obama White House, words are deeds. This belief that the president can swoop down and save the day with a game-changing speech has become a cornerstone of the administration’s political strategy. Such was the case with Obama’s September 9 nationally televised address on health care, which followed a full month of the White House struggling to find the votes it needed while histrionic opponents backed reform into a corner. The president’s speech, spangled with appealing rhetoric (“When facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom…we lose something essential about ourselves”), won the night’s snap polls, but it hasn’t yet brought him a single vote on the Hill. In the view of former Bush chief speechwriter and ardent Obama critic Marc Thiessen, that’s because public support for Obama’s plan is not where the president needs it to be, and “there’s no speech that can overcome that.” And even those who disagree with Thiessen’s assessment might want to consider his own experience with shaping public opinion through words alone: “In my time at the White House, we scheduled a series of speeches to bolster support for the mission in Iraq. When the situation on the ground in Iraq was improving, the speeches moved public opinion. But when the situation on the ground was deteriorating, it didn’t matter what we said—they barely moved the dial.”

Still, there’s no doubt that this White House is willing to bet a lot on the president’s gift for words. And in doing so, Obama is seeking the kind of intimate bond with the public not seen in the world since 1989, when the Czechs elected a playwright, Václav Havel, to be their president. As the Oval Office’s resident author, he would be in rarefied company.

“The only president who ever made a living as a writer was Teddy Roosevelt,” says historian and presidential biographer Douglas Brinkley. “Since then, we haven’t had anybody like that. JFK got the writer’s aura with Profiles in Courage, but we now know that was written by Ted Sorensen. Tony Dolan wrote most of Reagan’s speeches. But I think Obama’s in a league with TR. He created his political reputation through the written word.”

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