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In a succinct New York Times editorial, “The Obama-Clinton Issue,” David Brooks gets to the core of what sets Barack Obama apart in a field of post-Nixon Presidential Candidates:

But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.

Obama would be the healer, the rationalizer, the thinker and the listener that we’ve been deprived of for seven years. As Brooks puts it, Obama “has a core”—he’s “an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones”—in turbulent times he would be his own rock.

(Photo by “Barack Obama“)