Last summer, I taught a class on narrative nonfiction. About halfway through, I asked if anyone knew why Barack Obama had been elected.  “Because he’s a man.”  “Because George Bush was so bad.”  Good answers, but not right, in my opinion.  It was, I think, because he understood the power of narrative. It was because he is, before a politician, a writer.  I have thought this since I first heard him speak:  Here was someone who really understood the power of words and stories to move us.   In a recent story in GQ, by Robert Draper unpacks this side of the President’s life, and leaves me only more convinced that Barack Obama is a writer first, and all else second.