Column: Why Obama cried

• Why did 'no drama Obama' let down his guard, and his tears?
• I think it has something to do with Gandhi and Nehru.
• Leaders today have to be dream makers and also provide government services.

In Righteous Republic, a new history of the founding of modern India, Ananya Vajpeyi observes that countries today are caught in a fundamental contradiction.

On the one hand, they are dream machines that bind diverse populations together through something akin to poetry or religion.

On the other hand, they are pragmatic devices for the efficient delivery of governmental services. "The modern state," she writes, "has to look sometimes like a revolutionary dream and at other times like the telephone company."

Modern politicians are caught in this same bind. They have to give us a dream — a dream worth dying for in some cases. But they also have to govern.

In India, Mohandes "Mahatma" Gandhi is often seen as the dreamer while India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, plays the pragmatic politician. But as Vajpeyi observes, Nehru himself was actually both. During the fight for independence, he worked alongside Gandhi to spark the revolutionary imagination. After independence, he had the decidedly less glamorous job of running the telephone company.

In a video that has now gone viral, President Obama can be seen crying while thanking his campaign staff for their hard work during his winning campaign. He is talking about how he got his start in politics, admiring his youthful volunteers for being far more effective than he ever was, and wondering about where their lives will lead them. There has been much speculation about why "no drama Obama" let down his guard, and his tears. Truth be told, the president himself probably doesn't know.

Consider Gandhi, Nehru

I think it has something to do with Gandhi and Nehru. U.S. presidential campaigns are not really about the nuts and bolts of politics, and they are only indirectly about issues such as abortion or taxes.

Our presidential campaigns are first and foremost about America and Americans. Every four years, candidates tell us who we are as a people and what our nation has been and ought to become, and every four years we vote for a vision.

But after the election comes the governing. Presidents-elect must morph from dream makers into telephone company executives.

Mitt Romney was the quintessential executive. His pitch was that he could run the country because he had run a company. But could he govern, given the fact that he was running as the standard-bearer of a party that, since Ronald Reagan, has never quite figured out how to do the pragmatic thing and the vision thing at the same time? Lurking behind the perception that Republican leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are perpetually campaigning is the reality that the GOP has shown far more interest in recent years in preaching its gospel of America than in fixing what's broken here.

Obama's vulnerability as a candidate was that he was seen as the anti-Romney — a man who knew how to campaign but not how to govern; a man who wrote a book called Dreams from My Father yet couldn't figure out how to compromise with an uncompromising Congress.

Channeling two faces

What made his dismal performance in the first debate so startling was that Obama the dream maker didn't show up. He seemed to be too busy running the country to be bothered with attending the debate.

And what made his performance during Superstorm Sandy so winning was that here, at least, he seemed to know just how to pull the levers of government — to deliver the services the American people so desperately want their government to provide.

According to Vajpeyi, the modern state "invariably has two faces, one turned toward the political imagination and the other toward bureaucratic rationality." To be successful, modern politicians need these two faces, too. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Reagan, they need to tell us a tale. But they also need to get stuff done.

When I saw the tears roll down Obama's face, I saw a man turning from a task at which he obviously excels ("the political imagination") to a task at which his skills are still being tested ("bureaucratic rationality"). I saw him morphing before our eyes from a man doing something he loves (running a campaign) into a guy doing something he is duty bound to do (running the "telephone company" in the midst of a superstorm).

We now know Obama will be a two-term president. We also know he can inspire. But channeling Gandhi is not enough. To be a successful leader today you need to channel Nehru, too. Whether Obama is to be judged a great president will depend on his ability to do just that.

Stephen Prothero is a Boston University religion professor and the author of The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation.

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