Obama's obsession.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - President Barack Obama - Brief article

Jonathan Alter's new book about Obama is mostly reassuring about the president. Alter describes a man just as intelligent, unflappable, and dedicated to the public interest as those of us who voted for him believed him to be. Two seemingly minor details, however, aroused my anxiety. One is that by limiting, at the White House counsel's advice, his use of his BlackBerry to communication with only twenty-five or thirty people, he lost touch with the hundreds of people to whom he had been reaching out for advice and information. The other is his tendency to be a "control freak." One of his friends told Alter that "on a scale of...