Obama's Psychological Strength

On February 10th when Steve Croft of 60 Minutes, challenged Sen. Barack Obama with "The only thing that you've actually run was the Harvard Law Review!"

The young and innocent-looking leader stammered slightly and said "Well, I've run my Senate office and I've run this campaign." Big deal, right? Actually, a very big deal. The Obama '08 campaign has been nothing less than meteoric. And it now seems to be humming like a major professional services firm. In less than one year Obama can count on: 700 paid employees, hundreds of thousands of volunteers, nearly 1,000,000 contributors and $1,000,0000 a day in funding. Mitt Romney, take note.

Even so, what's most impressive is Obama's deft management of his own psyche. Think of all the promising politicians that have simply imploded by this stage, either stumbling over policy or just emotionally snapping under the swirl and sway of all that attention. Not only is he able to shoulder this immense responsibility, his organization has morphed and mushroomed over the past 12 months, and yet his ego and his psyche are well in check.

Croft: "Are you the same person that you were one year ago?"

Obama: "I don't think I've... gotten too secrewed up through the process" Obama chuckled, "It turns out even under this kind of stress I've got a pretty even temperament. I don't get too high I don't get too low."

The even temper may be the result of a certain level of detachment, not just from the swirl and the sway, but even from himself. This is a trait that another political genius demonstrated amply, Ronald Reagan.

One of his habits -- exercise, also happens to be another of the 20 traits of a very distinct minority -- highly healthy personalities. "I've held up pretty good. But I've been religious about getting my exercise", which for the lanky 46-year old is basketball -- EVERYDAY.

Senator Hillary Clinton drinks tea.

Obama also enunciated a third trait when he acknowledged that he did a reality check on himself before entering the race, "I had to think about this long and hard, at the beginning of this process and say, 'Are you deluding yourself or ah... do you really think that you can do all those things?' And I decided you know that I might just might be able to pull it off... a year later the jury is still out but we seem to be stirring up things pretty good." Obama then gave one of his modest but knowing smiles, sharing just a bit of the glee that he's now feeling.

Obama knew then that the Democratic race was over, before his last five victories, because he knew that there was little chance that he would screw up the management of the one thing that could lose him the nomination, himself. If you don't believe that, remember what the very junior Senator from Illinois did when the 60 Minutes heavyweight leveled the toughest criticism that anyone has of him, that he has "no executive experience!"

He laughed.