Michael Gerson is a sanctimonious, bleeding-heart, touchy-feely kind of liberal (and he doesn't answer emails). Obama is a tough, dispassionate, truly BLACK liberal. If he seems without pity, that is because he is without cruelty (cf. Freud: pity is suppressed cruelty). Obama's forte is a sheer, immense cognitive grasp of how government works (read his "Audacity"), and a, shall we say, Nietzschian will to power, power being in that sense something greater than vanity, something greater than morality, even ethics: a realization of cosmic cross-pollenation and the war of the mind.