Mark Whitaker, Washington bureau chief for NBC News, gets at the truth about President Obama in today’s Washington Post.  The truth is that Barack Obama may be the least-prepared individual to be president in recent memory.  Certainly his preparation for life is incredible — from his mixed-up childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard, to time as a community organizer in Chicago and his meteoric rise to the presidency.   As Whitaker writes, Obama’s

was exactly the right temperament to help Americans avert a fiscal and emotional meltdown in the early days of the financial crisis.

But as the French say, we all have the faults of our virtues. In President Obama’s case, the highly organized defenses he developed as a result of his dysfunctional childhood may have left him ill-prepared to confront the more unruly forces of cynicism, egotism and self-interest that hold sway in Washington, on Wall Street and on the world stage.

A successful presidency requires internal resources and personal skills that Obama may not yet have:

As Ronald Reagan showed, [a successful presidency] requires a sense for majesty and mystery. As LBJ demonstrated, it demands a behind-the-scenes talent for flattery and intimidation. As JFK proved, it helps to have an ironic, rather than a self-righteous, view of human motives and vanity.

But Barack Obama has grown in every job he has had to date.   There is no reason to doubt he can grow as president. The country right now needs a president with unusual mastery of his job.  So let’s hope that Barack Obama is getting the rest he needs to regenerate himself as he walks the sands of Oahu with his family.

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