[President Obama, whose cool, no-drama style has for years set him apart from the extroverted politicians so common in Washington
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President
Obama comforting Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the
funeral for Mr. Biden's son Beau. Mr. Obama delivered a tearful eulogy. CreditDoug Mills/The |
WASHINGTON — His eyes well up
without warning in private, thinking about his teenage daughters growing up. He
choked back tears in public recently while delivering a eulogy for Beau Biden, the son of Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who died at 46.
He let his passions show this month in a closed meeting with
House Democrats, just days after blurting out an uncharacteristically
affectionate greeting to a nun before a health care speech.
President
Obama, whose cool, no-drama style has for years set him apart from
the extroverted politicians so common in Washington
Longtime colleagues say they are witnessing a more human side of
the commander in chief than they have seen before.
“My
takeaway was, ‘Wow — where’s this guy been?’ ”
said Kent Conrad, a former Democratic senator from North
Dakota III ,
known as Beau.
“I turned to my wife and said, ‘My God, if he’d shown those
kinds of feelings, and that kind of connection to others, I think he would have
had a different experience as president,’ ”
Mr. Conrad said. “If he could let himself show that, he would do much better with the American people,
and much better with Congress.”
When Mr. Obama made a surprise visit to Capitol Hill recently to plead with Democrats
to support his trade agenda in
the face of charges from labor unions and other opponents that doing so would
doom middle-class workers while enriching big corporations, he veered from his
normal script.
Instead of the kind of policy-heavy dissertation Mr. Obama
usually offers, attendees said, he gave a more personal speech, reaching back
to his days as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago.
“It was a cri de coeur,” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly,
a Virginia Democrat who listened to the president in a conference room adjacent
to the Capitol. “You could really see the strain.”
Mr. Connolly said Mr. Obama was
“as emotional as I’ve ever seen him get” as he told fellow Democrats that he
was hurt that they would believe he would agree to a trade deal that would
undercut workers and the middle class.
Days earlier, Mr. Obama had begun a health care speech with an
uncommonly intimate greeting for Sister Carol Keehan, the chief executive of
the Catholic Health Association of the United States
“I don’t know whether this is appropriate, but I just told
Sister Carol I love her,” he said. It was the kind of comment his demonstrative
vice president is known for making, but less often heard from the president.
It is not as if Mr. Obama is
suddenly channeling Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, who is known
for a misty eye and a quivering lip during interviews and in floor speeches.
And the recent displays of emotion are not his first; the president cried while
addressing staff after his 2012 re-election, and again a month later talking
about the Newtown, Conn.,
shooting massacre, which killed 20 young children and six adults.
But even Mr. Obama has admitted that he has been blindsided
recently by fits of sadness, many of them prompted by the thought of his
daughters — 14-year-old Sasha, who graduated this month from middle school, and
16-year-old Malia, who will go to college next year — growing up.
“I start tearing up in the
middle of the day and I can’t explain it,” Mr. Obama told attendees at an
Easter prayer breakfast in April. “Why am I so sad? They’re leaving me.”
He wiped away tears in February as he bade farewell to Eric H.
Holder Jr., a confidant who served for six years as his attorney general. In
April, he heaved a freighted sigh as he spoke of his grief “as a husband and as
a father” about the deaths of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, American
and Italian hostages accidentally
killed in a drone strike that
he had ordered to take out leaders of Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama’s face was grim and his voice subdued as
hedelivered a statement,
by turns mournful and angry, about the fatal shooting of nine people at a black
church in Charleston , S.C.
People close to the president say he is often unfairly tagged as
apathetic simply because he does not carry on publicly about his feelings. But
some also suggest that in the penultimate year of his presidency, Mr. Obama may
feel more free to express himself.
“There’s a level of comfort that comes with having been in the
role for that length of time, and he’s past his political life, as far as
elections go,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama who has
known him for 23 years. “That may give him a greater sense of comfort in
revealing feelings and being emotive.”
Mr. Obama tends to be especially affected by anything that
causes him to reflect on family, Mr. Axelrod added. He said he had often spoken
with the president about how losing a child would be the worst thing that could
ever happen.
That seemed apparent during Mr. Obama’s eulogy for Beau Biden —
some of it delivered in a voice thick with tears as his eyes welled — and a
long embrace that he shared afterward with Mr. Biden, who also lost his wife
and 18-month-old daughter decades ago in a car accident that nearly killed
Beau.
“This is, in many ways, a private man — he is not somebody who
wears his emotions on his sleeve,” Mr. Connolly said of Mr. Obama. “That
doesn’t mean he doesn’t have emotions”.
