Compare Personas

Barack H. Obama

Linear, uni-directional, non-deterministic, morally inflected. Obama's repeated invocation of "the arc of the moral universe" (drawn from MLK and Theodore Parker) is the explicit time-theology of his politics: history is open, but it bends, and sustained agency is required to keep it bending.

Barack H. Obama

Substantival and cosmopolitan. Obama's spatial imagination is unusual among American Presidents in being shaped from the outset by non-mainland places — Honolulu, Jakarta, Chicago, Kenya — and by the constitutional-law conviction that the United States is a particular kind of national space rather than an exception to the structure of national space as such.

Barack H. Obama

Conventional: substantival, conserved, three-dimensional, local. The Affordable Care Act, the auto-industry rescue, and the Recovery Act treated material economic reality as a real constraint requiring real interventions.

Barack H. Obama

Single embodied person, plural among others, deliberatively active. Personal metaphysical agency: a Christian theism articulated more reservedly than Bush's but no less serious in the autobiographical writing. "I am not a perfect man; I will not be a perfect President. But I believe in the possibility of redemption." ("A More Perfect Union," 2008)

Barack H. Obama

Conventional: finite, conserved, irreversible. Energy policy and climate policy were treated as a unified challenge requiring both market mechanisms (the renewables investment of the 2009 Recovery Act) and international coordination (the Paris Agreement).

Barack H. Obama

Conserved at both scales. The presidency presided over the social-media transformation of political communication and the Snowden-era debate over state collection; the post-presidential turn to disinformation as a category of analysis continues that thread.