What bemuses insiders is the idea that Obama is somehow a stoic. That’s laughable. There’s a healthy amount of dopamine in his president. In private, the President can be witheringly sarcastic and profane. He can also be light, playful; he is rarely sad, occasionally angry, and always upbeat. This Spock has emotions. What he does not do — and what he is poor at doing — is fake an emotion simply for the sake of appearing to display an emotion.
We make a logical error in assuming that he does not allow emotional considerations to guide his policy. What Obama wants doesn’t matter; he can’t make a decision without emotion; emotions often (or always) tip the strict logic scales we keep in our brains and use to make decisions. We also assume that the lack of displayed emotion is not emotion at all.
When Obama is angry, when he is frustrated, he begins to take stock of arguments; his anger shifts him into law professor mode. He struggles to pack facts into his pre-frontal cortex. He wants to get the decision right. Now, sometimes, he gets paralyzed by analysis, as the author Jonah Lehrer might say; but even here, we make the mistake of separating rationality from emotion. Unless the man’s brain is wired differently, even the process of weighing evidence is washed by the emotional processors of his limbic system.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member