Mental Landscapes

We've been trying to figure out the personality depths of our president, to understand why he's such a poor negotiator, and something that Nicholas Lemann just wrote in The New Republic is about as revealing as it gets. Lemann is reviewing, actually, the George W. Bush presidential memoir, and he begins by tossing off an observation about Barack Obama's books-on-tape reading of his own memoir, "Dreams From My Father":

...Obama’s uncanny gift for mimicry. Again and again he will encounter a character and deliver the material that appears within quotation marks on the printed page in the character’s voice. He can do men and women, old and young, foreign accents and street slang.

To pull this off requires not just vocal ability but an intensity of observation of other people—a quality of attention, of absorption—so fierce it’s as if one’s life depended on it. And there is a sense, in the case of Obama, in which his life did depend on it, sociologically and psychologically. He had to imagine his way into the center of American society from a very unusual point on the periphery, to invent an identity for himself that felt comfortable, to find a way to love parents whom one would more naturally resent for having been so often absent. There is no more vivid imitation in the book than the one of his father, whom he barely knew—big, lilting, funny, dominating, elusive. How hard Obama must have strained to drink in every drop of his father’s presence during the rare moments when he had it—but how little effort was required for him to figure out where his father ended and he began....

Don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of armchair psychoanalysis, but I read that "straining" to mimic as an over-eagerness to please men perceived as powerful (though why Mitch McConnell, for example, would qualify is a pure-dee mystery!).