Projection?
Rex Murphy in the Globe and Mail
Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”…
This is the nature of Mr. Obama’s particular kind of charisma. People project their best wishes on him, they fill in the blank of a very attractive and plausible outline. His is not, emphatically, a charisma of deeds. For what has he done, save run for president? He is an accommodating vessel — cool, smart, biracial and “unfinished.” This is the Gatsby quality of him that others have noted. Like Gatsby, he is a receptacle of others’ glamorous invention…
Mr. Obama’s charisma is, in this sense, external, something extended to the candidate. And it follows that that which is given may equally be taken away. The sparkle has, in fact, dimmed. He travels now in a lower orbit, closer to Earth — which is to say, he grows more mundane…He has shrunk into a combative partisan. He crowds his own screen, leaves less space for projection. Others are not writing his narrative now — he’s inscribing his own.
This analysis seems similar to one made back in February by Dr. Krauthammer, who thought the magic aura might well last until January 21, 2009.