Looking Ahead from President to Candidate Obama

How well do we really know our president? All week we’ll be looking at the President Obama that has emerged over the past two years, and what that portends about Barack Obama’s future plans as he seeks re-election in 2012. David Bromowich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, says that when the nation elected Barack Obama, they actually got two presidents, not one.

On the one hand, we have an oratorical master who excels at raising the expectations of a nation desperately in need of hope; on the other, those speeches seem to exist in a vacuum, divorced from the actions or the skillset that executive Obama has to deliver on those promises. But which of those presidents will be on display as the 2012 campaign nears?