I found this interview from his final year in office fascinating. It leaves me with a sense of Obama as embodying the most thoughtful strand of the New Labour project, Geoff Mulgan and Matthew Taylor rather than Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, in spite of all the pathologies which characterised this project.
(though actually perhaps the relevant figure here is Michael Barber rather than Geoff Mulgan)
This is interesting on Obama’s style of communication:
Hart oversees the Campaign Mapping Project, which, among other things, tracks the language patterns of presidential candidates. The project found that compared with the other 24 folks who ran for the presidency between 1948 and 2008, Obama was the lowest on “Complexity” — a measure of average word size — and also lowest on “Embellishment” — a measure of the ratio of adjectives-plus-adverbs to nouns-plus-verbs.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100525275
Mark Carrigan 