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.
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