A Presidential Line Between Work and Play

[elleng]

“He doesn’t crave the spotlight the way some of these other presidents have. They needed to be constantly in the eye of the public; it propelled them into politics in the first place. Obama is less that way; he is more of a self-contained person, someone who can genuinely spend time by himself with his family.” . .

Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who knew Mr. Obama’s parents when they were students in Honolulu, says that what the president finds here is not so much privacy but “acceptability” — the protective cocoon that comes with being in the warm embrace of a familiar place, where people regard him as “ohana,” Hawaiian for “extended family.”

“He’s not living in isolation; he’s living in the middle of the Kailua neighborhood,” the governor said. “So what I mean by acceptability, rather than privacy, is that everybody accepts that concept of ohana and family, and that it extends to him, most especially to him. We consider him a keiki o ka aina, a child of the land.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/politics/26memo.html?_r=1&hp