"President George W. Bush once
boasted,
"I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player." The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying,
"You've got to make decisions based on information and not emotions."
Obama's handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been
a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.
"He's establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration," says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says
the Bush-Cheney style was "cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive."
Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said:
"He's not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn't go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable."
