Obama: Managing His First Crisis

President Obama has led a charmed life. Now it's time for him to resize his spectacular image and show that he can endure the everyday ups and downs of the Oval Office

By Eric Dezenhall

I committed an act of heresy recently when I told a die-hard Obamaniac friend that while I believed the arc of the new President's life was extraordinary, I rejected the notion that Barack Obama had lived a uniquely rough existence. I argued that on the contrary, Obama has enjoyed a staggeringly charmed life, his path to the Presidency in particular being an almost unbroken highway of green lights.

My friend reacted to my observation as if I had just endorsed child abuse; the quasi-biblical, nomadic sufferings of the new President being the only acceptable narrative in polite society.

The First Missteps on the Maiden Voyage

I had been trying to make a point about Obama's readiness to manage crises—the improvisational art in which I make my living. My concern is that there is a huge difference between the confidence that stems from a life of good fortune and that which comes from having consistently weathered searing pushback.

President Obama has had a rough week in terms of crisis management, a predictable folly that I pin on the everyday rough-and-tumble of political life as well as an oblivious overconfidence that whispers, "We don't make the mistakes that they do." Obama's Health & Human Services Cabinet nominee, Tom Daschle, and his Chief Performance Officer nominee, Nancy Killefer, withdrew their nominations after stepping on tax land mines. Even though Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner overcame his own tax snafu, it was, nevertheless, a distracting embarrassment.

While far from being Obama's Bay of Pigs, these missteps mark the beginning of his "shakedown cruise," the maiden voyage where the seaworthiness of his Administration is put to its initial test. The tax problems of Obama's appointments were especially mortifying because they were the kinds of violations that the most rudimentary vetting exercises are supposed to catch. The contrast between these events and the Obama brand are stark, highlighting the irony that his greatest political assets are simultaneously his twin liabilities: the aura of flawless hypercompetence and divinely inspired moral authority.

The Dangers of Oversell

Throughout his campaign, Obama didn't exactly work overtime to defuse his larger-than-life persona (think about the quasi-Presidential seal emblazoned on his airplane seat and his campaign podiums). He will rightly be cut some slack for a little while because he inherited our domestic and international crises, but the voting public will not excuse him forever if he fails to bridge the canyon that differentiates being Zeus from being Homer Simpson.

Put differently, when you live by the holy man mystique, you will surely be betrayed by it as you sail into the lethal shoals of damage control. An apt cautionary tale for Obama may be found in the recent annals of business, not politics.

In the 1990s, Hollywood talent agent Michael Ovitz enjoyed an avalanche of giddy publicity as a result of an orchestrated PR campaign to position himself as the "most powerful man in Hollywood." Fawning headlines and magazine covers touted his Zen-like mien, his omniscient eyes and ears, the fear his name instilled in the heart of mere showbiz mortals and, ironically, given all the self-generated hype, his secretiveness.

So awe-inspiring was Ovitz's reputation that his friend, then-Disney chief Michael Eisner, confronting heart trouble, tapped Ovitz to become his chief operating officer. Calamity famously ensued at Disney (DIS) when it quickly became clear that whatever gifts Ovitz had as a talent agent did not translate to running one of the world's largest entertainment conglomerates. Ovitz got a pink slip in the range of $100 million to $200 million.

You can fool all of the people who want to be fooled all of the time. In the recent election, we were a nation that desperately wanted to assign exclusively superhuman traits to Obama, just as Eisner did to Ovitz.