The New York Review of Books: down on Obama

A reconsideration worth considering:

Obama has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy.
[...]
For Obama, protracted moods of extreme abstraction seem to alternate with spasmodic engagement.
[...]
Obama tends to speak as if he were the United States addressing the world; and he treats the United States as the most grown-up country in the world.
[...]
Barack Obama from the start of his presidency has exhibited an almost exclusive taste for the dignified part of government.
[...]

This too is interesting: "Obama’s first twenty-three months in office saw seventy days on foreign trips and fifty-eight days on vacation trips."