In the anthology of Barack Obama quotations, one of the classics came just hours before the event that made him the hottest property in American politics.
As Obama walked toward the arena at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, where he gave an electrifying keynote address, a Chicago Tribune reporter noted that he seemed to be making a good impression.
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“I’m LeBron, baby,” Obama told author David Mendell. “I can play on this level. I got some game.”
Those words came at the start of the supernova phase of Obama’s career. But on Wednesday came another quote, not quite so crisp, destined to become an early marker of the crash-to-earth phase.
“This is something that I think every president needs to go through because … sometimes we lose track of the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place,” Obama said toward the end of his post-election news conference, after reporters' repeated questions pressing him to go beyond his clinical descriptions of the disastrous election results and explain whether he felt responsibility or remorse. “Now, I’m not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like they, like I did last night. I’m sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons. But I do think this is a growth process and an evolution.”
Is he capable of growth? And how painful the evolution?
Many Obama observers regard these as central questions about his presidency as he tries to recover from an election debacle that many warned of for a year and that even some sympathizers regarded as a natural comeuppance for an exceptionally confident man who slipped into overconfidence.
The results also served as a reminder that Obama is not immune from a timeless truth: Every president’s defects are in part a magnification of his virtues.
Self-regard can blur into self-delusion. According to many Obama supporters and skeptics alike, it is still to be seen whether Obama shares with his most successful predecessors a capacity for self-critique and self-correction.
A year ago, after Democrats got trounced in off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia — in large measure because of the same flight of independents that helped the GOP triumph in the midterm elections — White House aides loudly and publicly stated that there were no lessons in the results that were relevant to Obama. And for most of the year that followed, they acted on that premise.