The Weight Of The World Weighs On Obama

The default mode of Barack Obama is motion; the activism of his young presidency is everywhere in evidence.

From the day he took office, he has been a blur of executive orders and challenges to Congress, almost manic in reacting to economic upheaval at home and threats abroad — all the while pushing for new national systems for health care, energy use and education.

So it seemed a dramatic contrast this week to see him cooped up in a small space deep within the White House, sitting for a joint interview by NPR hosts Michele Norris and Steve Inskeep.

Was that really the national symbol, the focus of so much global excitement, folded into a modest chair in the ground-level library? Amid this rather casual collection of books, the man's legendary aura and energy seemed almost caged — temporarily under house arrest.

Those in the room saw Inskeep and Norris bore in on Middle East policy, the president engaging with his typical seriousness but less than his usual buoyancy. The problems discussed are vexing, and the vexation shows.

Check the presidential costume: black suit, white shirt, stylish silk tie (solid cerulean blue), preternatural calm. Check, double-check. He is fully himself, and yet not so. A note of weariness creeps into an answer. A sense of late afternoon hangs in the room.

The impression may have come from the day the president had already logged. In the morning, he had announced the bankruptcy filing of General Motors. Once the greatest private manufacturing concern in the world, the jewel of American capitalism, GM was becoming a ward of the state.

After that sobering event, the president paid a visit to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where he met with more than 50 patients wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. He awarded Purple Hearts. Both wars continue under his regime, and the fighting in Afghanistan is escalating.

It was also a day of news dominated by an airliner lost at sea and an abortion doctor shot dead at his church on Sunday morning. But beyond the downbeat tone of the day's affairs, the presidential attitude seemed to anticipate the week ahead — and the weeks to come.

This week takes Obama abroad, pursuing U.S. aims in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Europe. The centerpiece of the trip is a speech at Cairo University billed as an address to the Muslim world.

It is not often that one national leader is able to address hundreds of millions of people in foreign lands, let alone to do so with the intent of changing their minds about his country. But the unique circumstances of this one man's birth and upbringing, his name and phenomenal rise, have made such a moment possible.

The president is clearly mindful of the Cairo moment — its enormous potential to alter the pattern of decades and generations of hostility and misunderstanding. Even for a president, this is a weighty assignment. And this president is a man who writes his most important speeches largely by himself, sacrificing sleep for the splendid concentration of the wee hours.

Whatever may happen with the speech and world reaction, the president will return from his trip facing critical tests on Capitol Hill between now and the August recess. The main one is House consideration of a bill overhauling the health care delivery system. The president said this week that these two months will be "the make-or-break period ... the time where we've got to get this done."

All other issues, even the energy bill and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, will be distractions. This president in his first year will be judged on how he handles health care no less than on his stewardship of the economy. And health care is not a hurdle he can clear with a speech, no matter how eloquent or visionary.

Contemplating all this might make anyone's demeanor somber.