Like its subject, Obama treatise is detail-oriented

May 18, 2010|Carlo Wolff, Globe Correspondent

Jonathan Alter delivers an engaging, blow-by-blow account of the infancy of the Obama presidency. Although he couldn’t include Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill, Alter is resolutely current: He updated “The Promise’’ at the last minute to incorporate passage of health care reform legislation in March. Manna for political junkies, Alter’s insider book is a largely admiring chronicle of a disciplined politician whose 2008 presidential drive set a standard for Internet-based, grass-roots organizing.

This thoroughly researched, occasionally critical work humanizes a figure considered periodically out-of-touch even by some of his admirers. “Even as he succeeded substantively,’’ Alter writes in the epilogue, “Obama was struggling with his tone.’’ Even Obama supporters concede that, while he grappled with daunting issues such as the recession and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he often failed to connect on a visceral level with the man and woman on the street as well as he did in his campaign.

That triumphant drive serves as a kind of contrast to a nuanced portrait of a man who took office loaded with high expectations and shortly realized that presiding over a divided electorate is much harder than running for president.

Alter’s tale of the Obama presidency begins before the election even takes place. Months before taking the oath of office, Alter suggests, Obama effectively took control of the economy. He offers an account of a meeting in late September 2008 to hash out details about the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Bush administration’s response to the Lehman Brothers default. The key players were President George W. Bush, Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a fierce Paulson critic and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Senator Obama.

“By this time the molecules of power in American politics were in a rapid state of realignment,’’ writes Alter, a Newsweek columnist and MSNBC commentator. “McCain’s absence from the discussion was stark. Bush, who was supposed to be leading the meeting, was poorly informed and detached. ‘He’s already in Crawford,’ whispered one Republican. That left the skinny African-American guy who had crashed into their world only three and a half years earlier. He was the only one of the big dogs who seemed to know what he was talking about.’’