The Obama Delusion, cont.

At a length of 13,000 words, “Obama’s Way” eventually offers a few items of interest. The president has begun to worry that people find him cold. He hastens to assure Lewis, in answer to a question Lewis didn’t ask, that this seeming defect is in fact a virtue. He’s no good, he says, at “faking emotion,” not realizing that this implies he has little emotion to fake.

He clings to his belief in his oratorical powers. “My best speeches are when I know that what I’m saying is true in a fundamental way. People find their strength in different places. That’s where I’m strong,” he says, failing to mention that he’s given a single moving speech (in honor of Gabby Giffords) among hundreds of speeches over the course of his term.

There’s something touching as well as creepy in the Delusion as it fades. Lewis’s article can be seen as one final effort to recapture the magic, to reinflate the soufflé long after it went pfft. It’s not Michael Lewis’s fault, it’s not even the fault of the White House staff, that the material just isn’t there.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.