Having carried the weight of the US on his shoulders for a few months, President Obama went to the G20 summit this week to try balancing the weight of the world as well. Normally these kinds of economic summits don’t warrant that much attention. They’re like watching a MLB all-star game with, say, Barry Bonds in it. If you’re so good, how come we’re never in the series?

But Bond is gone and so is Bush, which explains a lot of the interest in Obama this year. That and the dire, not-since-the-thirties state of economic peril the whole world is in. Those days were on the minds of the press who questioned the president (and literally cheered when he left), and the answer he gave was most telling: “If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy,” he said, “that’s an easier negotiation. “But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world we live in.”

That outlook, the “shouldn’t” part particularly, is what sets Obama apart from his predecessor. Here he is literally the anti-Bush, telling the world that the US cannot dictate terms to the rest of the world (though he strove, with some success, to limit protectionism among the other nations and to get them to commit to stimulus packages of their own) but also should not. That is literally the good news and the bad news: We’re in this together which also means you have to help me carry this load. Lend a shoulder. 

What some of the international press saw as his aloofness can be attributed to that Obama cool (you want heat, go get Berlusconi) and the fact that he was fighting a cold throughout the trip. But even at the top of his game, Obama would have been playing reality check with his audience. It reminds me of that famous Churchill story: A temperance woman approaches him after a campaign speech in a rural church and says, “Mr. Prime Minister, do you realize that all the brandy you had drunk in your life would nearly fill this hall?”

Churchill looked up at the ceiling and said, “So little time, so much to do.”