Two observations, after watching Barack Obama’s first post-election press conference:

• It is, as others have noted, a genuine pleasure — after eight long painful years — to hear our new President speaking in complete sentences and giving intelligent answers to unscripted questions.
• My expectations for Obama have always been realistic: I thought he was the right candidate at the right time,1 and I supported him from day one, but I didn’t think he would lead us to the Promised Land or anything.

  That said, I’m starting to get the impression that we’ve all misunderstood — or underestimated — what Obama meant when he called himself a community organizer. At first I thought this meant merely that Obama had done hard yards in urban neighborhoods, had worked to bring jobs to communities, pull together voter registration drives, and so on: Good work, necessary work, but not an unusual activity or a sign of exceptional talent.

  Now I’m starting to think Obama meant community organizer as “a person who organizes communities” — that is, a person who recognizes (or creates) a shared purpose, and then organizes a community to achieve it. And, I’m starting to think, Obama has Einstein-level talent at this type of organizing: He’s rolling straight from the best-organized presidential campaign we’ve ever seen to the best-organized transition team we’ve ever seen, and shows no signs of stopping there.

  And this is Obama’s hidden talent. When all is said and done, Obama’s speech-making skills will be measured against Churchill and King and Lincoln — and I think people underestimate Obama because they pigeonhole him as a great public speaker, and assume his organizing skills are a secondary talent. In fact, the opposite is true: Obama’s soaring speeches are a gateway talent, and Obama’s real strength is that he’s devastatingly efficient at turning inspiration into action.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

1. Specifically, I thought he was the first vote-with-your-heart candidate the Democrats had put forward in a long time, as opposed to vote-with-your-head candidates like John Kerry and the 2000 edition of Al Gore. [↩]