As President, Obama Gets More Personal

Barack Obama is a storyteller, and lately he has been telling lots of them: tales of sick children and a dying parent, of religious discovery and of a magical journey across the American West.

The stories have something in common: They all spring from Obama’s own life. And all of them have been invoked in recent weeks to establish a bond with an audience or promote an argument about his agenda.

Listen carefully to Obama’s speeches, and there is almost always something personal. It might be a reference to a family member — parents, wife or daughters — an aside about their new routine in the White House or an anecdote from his early life.

In some ways, Obama’s storytelling is familiar. He wrote his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” before he even ran for the state Legislature. Much of the early interest in him as a politician flowed from public fascination with his multiracial personal story, an asset that Obama regularly used to advantage on the 2008 campaign trail.

But the White House has brought a shift — subtle in some cases, but cumulatively striking.

As candidate, he often seemed to be carefully editing his biography, emphasizing the parts that were resonant and reassuring to an American audience: his family roots in Kansas, being raised by his single mother and doting grandparents in Hawaii.

As president, he evidently feels much more liberated to invoke other parts of his personal story when they can be used for effect.

“I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries,” he told the Arab news organization Al-Arabiya in an interview.

That comment would not likely have been heard during 2008, when Obama was laboring to combat an inaccurate but widespread perception that he was himself Muslim.

His remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast were similarly self-referential.

“I was not raised in a particularly religious household,” he said. “I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, and grandparents who were nonpracticing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion.”

Obama added, “I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college.”

All presidents in the modern communications age tend to weave their personal stories into their public images. John F. Kennedy had PT-109 and Richard Nixon described growing up listening to train whistles in the night. Bill Clinton promoted himself as “the man from Hope” and George W. Bush linked his emergence from an unfocused and alcohol-soaked period in his 20s and 30s to a spiritual awakening and more disciplined lifestyle in middle age.

The obvious difference with Obama is that his background is more exotic than the typical president. He claims ties to three regions in the United States — the Pacific, the Midwest and the Great Plains — two races and the continent of Africa and the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia. He is the child of a single mom. His father came from Kenya to the United States to attend college. He was raised by his grandparents. He has half-siblings. And he was a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago.

All this gives him more touchstones and cultural reference points than any predecessor — and he is not shy about invoking them in all manner of forums to make all manner of points. 

Some of this may be generational, in an age of Twitter and Facebook in which people have grown accustomed to nonstop self-narration. Still, Obama’s baritone voice and more reserved style mean his stream of self-references typically don’t have the moist stickiness of Bill Clinton telling listeners, “I feel your pain.” Still, they are a pretty far cry from Dick Cheney-style stoicism.

“Barack Obama obviously has experiences like no other president in history in terms of the diversity of his background,” said Gerhard Peters, a co-founder of the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

During his online town hall meeting on Thursday, for instance, Obama got personal to stress one of his major policy initiatives: health care reform.

He told the story many have heard of his mother, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at age 53. “She died six months later,” he said. “But I still remember watching her. You know, she’s sick. She’s gone through chemotherapy, and she’s on the phone arguing with insurance companies.”

Obama also discussed the birth of his first daughter, Malia, and how his younger daughter, Sasha, got meningitis when she was 3 months old.

“You know, the doctors did a terrific job,” Obama said, “but, frankly, it was the nurses that were there with us when she had to get a spinal tap and all sorts of things that were just bringing me to tears.”

Earlier this month, when speaking about his education plan to members of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Obama noted that his father, like many of their fathers, came to America in pursuit of better opportunities.

He also mentioned that his sister is a teacher. He told the story about his mother waking him up every morning to give him supplemental school lessons when they lived in Indonesia. And he pointed out that his idea for longer school days isn’t popular with his daughters, either.

As that line suggested, not all his family references are made in service of profound points. Some fall firmly in the so-what category.

When British Prime Minster Gordon Brown came to town, Obama ritualistically invoked the “special relationship” between the two countries before adding, “And by the way, that’s also where my mother’s side of my family came from.”

“It’s how he naturally communicates,” deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton said of Obama’s search for personal links to the subject of time.

Earlier this month, to stress to Interior Department employees how much he values them, Obama told a story about a road trip from the Grand Canyon to the Great Lakes that his grandmother took him, his sister and his mother on for his 11th birthday.

“It’s an experience that’s only possible because of the work you do each and every day,” Obama said.

The Kansas connection was too ripe to go unmentioned the day he announced Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, and Sen. Pat Roberts was on hand, as well.

“People in Kansas, we stick together,” Obama said. “And I’ve got my own Kansas roots here, so I’m particularly pleased to be joined by so many Kansans.”

At times people are inspired to spontaneously let Obama know they feel a connection.

“I would just like to say as a mixed-raced individual, it’s so fantastic to finally have a role model and a leader that I can actually identify with,” a woman told him at his Los Angeles town hall meeting earlier this month.

During the campaign, Obama talked about race with audiences that he felt would be receptive to the groundbreaking nature of his candidacy, while other times he emphasized that his race was not central to his campaign or qualifications. He also regularly mentions his mother and his grandmother almost as he regularly as he did during the campaign when he needed to make inroads with female voters.

“This is a way for him to connect,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Houston. “Some of the things that Obama has done allow him to be persuasive with different groups.”

If there is a political subtext to the personal stories, it falls within bounds by the standards of politicians, analysts say, and does not mean the stories themselves are not genuine.

“He sees his experience as an American experience, so he sees his life story as the country’s life story,” said political scientist Martha Joynt Kumar, an expert on presidential communication. “His family becomes part of that.”

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