From The Times UK
By Andrew Sullivan

His calm is almost unnatural. I’ve been following Barack Obama closely now for two years and I’ve never seen him or even heard of him losing his temper. The worst I’ve seen was a little irritation at a fund-raiser a year and a half ago where some volunteers backstage were making so much noise that he couldn’t think straight. There was a little edge in his voice as he asked them to quieten down.

During some of the tensest moments in the primary campaign, he would sometimes go into a hotel room alone for a few minutes, compose himself and then come back out. Hillary Clinton cried in public. Bill Clinton got red in the face and made some borderline racist remarks. John McCain picked Sarah Palin, called Obama Britney Spears, suspended his campaign in the middle of a financial panic, unveiled a completely loopy mortgage bailout scheme on live television last week and explodes on cue like a microwaved bag of popcorn.

Obama? He lollops along with a calm smile and a physical fluency that is hard to mock or copy. If he were a boxer, he’d be the kind who keeps moving but hangs back. He waits for his opponents to take a swing, ducks and comes back into the game. He sticks to a game plan and rarely deviates. And he waits for his opponent to make an error. Watching his autumn fight with McCain reminds me of the Wile E Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Every elaborate attempt to blow Obama up leaves his opponents with sooty faces and a trail of smoke rising from the tops of their heads.

Remember the Clintons? They assumed this young liberal black man from Chicago was unelectable. They assembled their massive armoury, cashed in their chits and awaited the victory parade. Obama quietly but ruthlessly followed a stealth caucus and primary campaign that brilliantly leveraged Hillary’s inevitability against her. He made the first potential woman president look like the past. By the beginning of March, she was toast, although it took her a few more months to come to terms with it.

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