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• Position: The Promise: President Obama, Year One - Book review

The Promise: President Obama, Year One

By Jonathan Alter

Simon & Schuster. 458 pages. $28.

When Robert Gibbs, Present Obamas press secretary, assailed "the professional left" in August for being impossible to satisfy, he was expressing a common White House sentiment. At least that's what Jonathan Alter reports in his new book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One.

For the most part, Alter agrees with the White House criticism. In The Promise , he carries a brief for Obama. It's a brief worth considering.

Alter, as you probably know, is a longtime national affairs columnist for Newsweek and frequent MSNBC commentator. He's a self-identified liberal and a good guy, though after 9/11, he made an unfortunate plea for psychological torture, which he later recanted.

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The essence of The Promise is that Obama has the ideal personality to be President, and he has accomplished just about the most that was politically feasible.

I'm not going to spend much time weighing Alter's assessment of Obama's character and leadership qualities: "decency, equanimity, intelligence, analytical rigor. An ability to inspire, set goals, and execute." Alter devotes one whole chapter to Obama's "Zen temperament," and vouches for his sincerity: "There weren't many one-faced politicians around," he writes.

That seems a little over the top (can you say Van Jones?). Now I've never met Obama, and I suppose I'm prepared to stipulate that he's almost as wonderful as Alter describes. But I do know that Obama has appeared terribly naive in his appeals for transcending partisanship. As Alter himself recognizes, "He had promised something that he couldn't deliver--a capital culture where Democrats and Republicans worked together." And Obama was warned about this naivete on the campaign trail by none other than Hillary Clinton.

Leaving aside Alter's character reference, let's look at Obama's performance regarding the economy, health care, the war on Afghanistan, and civil liberties.

O n the economy, Alter undermines his thesis by conceding that Obama did not reach widely enough for his choice as Treasury Secretary. "The short list for Treasury, the most crucial post in the early Obama Administration, would be exceptionally short from the start." It consisted of two "establishment" names: Tim Geithner and Larry Summers.

Alter also concedes that Obama did not bargain well on the bank bailout. "He failed to attach more conditions," Alter writes, because...