3 key insights about Obama from Chuck Todd's The Stranger

The image of himself on the cover of Chuck Todd's The Stranger might have seemed "lonely" to the president when he glanced across its cover at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington. But inside, it's as good an account as you'll read about the first five years of his presidency, and it includes a number of insights that are helpful for unlocking the puzzle that is President Obama.

1. The slow death of earmarks is one significant and overlooked reason why the White House had (and has) fewer tools at its disposal to negotiate with Republicans and keep Democrats happy. Combine that with President Obama's distaste for schmoozing, which satisfies Congressional egos and goes a long way to bridge bridgeable gaps when it's done properly, and the president simply could not bring a full arsenal to the table. Obama's negotiating style — to identify common ground and then assume that the other side will proceed rationally from there — did not work in Washington.

At the same time, the passage of the first omnibus bill to fund the government in 2009, laden with earmarks, marked the first time that Obama faced the realities of his promise to change the way Washington did business. It was "the president's biggest political regret of his first term" — that he sent a message that he could "be rolled" — but he also knew, as Robert Gibbs put it, that his anti-earmark stance "was tying his hands." His own party simply did not abide by his view of how Washington should work, even though his anti-earmark pledge had gotten significant applause during the State of the Union address that year.

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2. Joe Biden's style — compromise with the goal of "aggregating mutual political satisfaction" — was much more suited to the realm. Biden played "another important role for the president, as buffer for the Clintons." It was "among his unwritten duties." Obama's relationship with Hillary Clinton "was by no means as friendly as the White House liked to pretend." Biden's negotiating relationship with Mitch McConnell provided the White House with many victories it might not otherwise have realized. He was the "McConnell whisperer."

3. The president's "survival of the fittest" mentality ahead of the 2010 midterm elections "made sense to him and him alone." The White House resigned itself "to a fate other Democrats did not believe was sealed. And — perhaps most enraging — these Washington Democrats hated the White House for believing that the Obama brand and the Democratic brand were distinct, and that one were paramount over the other."

It did not help matters, Todd writes, that the White House refused to believe that voters would be skeptical that Obama was not "of" Washington because they associated him with his party, which controlled Congress. Inside the White House, several advisers believed that Obama "had to stand with allies, especially those who had knowingly taken tough votes that would likely cost them their seats." But Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and others wanted the president to stay away from the losing Democratic brand.

Here are several other reported nuggets and observations that illustrate the president's personal and management style:

- Obama's initial instincts to crises are typically slow and reasoned. He disdains the theater he associates with immediate presidential proclamations of outrage and sympathy. After the BP oil leak, Robert Gibbs "remembers going into the Oval Office in the early days of the leak and begging the president to show some anger. The president replied logically, 'And how much oil is that going to clean up?'" Incidentally, a White House speechwriter thought that Obama's Oval Office speech about the oil spill "was the worst of the Obama presidency," Todd writes.

- Most White House staffers who worked on health care believed that too much credit was given to Nancy-Ann DeParle, and this caused significant West Wing friction.

- Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's former chief of staff, was actually angling to replace Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff.

- Obama had several private meetings with former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, a law school classmate. Both sides liked to keep these meetings quiet because Mehlman did not want to undermine his standing with Republicans.

- National Security Adviser Tom Donilon "seemed to argue both sides of the question" far too often. "He was known as well-organized, a great person to execute someone else's decision and even pretty good at running meetings designed to share information. But as a decision-maker, he was notoriously ineffective. … His fear of being on the wrong side of a presidential decision would get the best of him."

- The White House froze out the professional political reporters who had long covered politics, even the chief political correspondent of The New York Times and Dan Balz of The Washington Post. He was also the first presidential candidate in a generation not to say yes to an interview with The Washington Post's editorial board.

(You can buy The Stranger, published by Hachette Book Group, in bookstores everywhere.)