To be a legislator, George Will once quipped, is to be an appropriator. More, it is to be a conciliator and a compromiser, a man who cobbles together coalitions to achieve his ends and thereby only reaches his ends piecemeal, if at all. To be an executive is to do, to lead, to decide. Necessarily, an executive fails sometimes; his job is not to find consensus but to forge and impose it, and sometimes to act in spite of its lack. The legislator is at most, sometimes, the first among equals. The executive is the first.

It’s not really surprising that very few of our Presidents have done both things very well as President, even if the development of the administrative state calls for both skill sets. We laud Abraham Lincoln, a former legislator at the State and Federal levels, for seeing the nation through the Civil War, but the truth is that he was, the Civil War notwithstanding (that’s admittedly a big “notwithstanding”), a somewhat indifferent President as we now define the office, ceding control of legislation more or less entirely to Congress, and truthfully doing a poor job as Commander-in-Chief for the first couple of years of the war effort out of a paradoxically mixed inability to execute control over his generals and a desire to control war planning. More recently, John Kennedy was more or less a disaster as a President, though whether that is due to an underlying defect in his character, the incredible cocktail of drugs he took, or his brief prior career as a legislator is something of an open question. When we think of his successor, we frequently think with glowing imagery of his hard-nosed push of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through Congress, then marvel at the haggard Johnson, broken by his stumbling micromanagement of the Vietnam War and unable to command enough of a following to win his own Party’s primary. We marvel when we should understand that these two effects stem from the same cause: The man was a ruthless, amoral, crass, singleminded politician, but he was a decades-long legislator first and foremost; his ability to work the legislative and collaborative process of Congress is the flip side of his inability to command his Cabinet and subordinate officers without trying to do their jobs for them.

The other gift of a legislator, of course, is his gift for gab. Legislators are appropriators and talkers. Legislators talk to persuade, to form coalitions, and, if we’re going to be honest, to hear the sounds of their own voices. It is not coincidental that so many legislators are former attorneys, and so few former CEOs; if there’s anything attorneys have to do naturally, it’s talk. (And talk, and talk, and talk.) Put differently, no executive would filibuster, because to do so would mean he has lost the ability to execute.

Last week’s glowing encomia for President Obama’s first 100 days in office reflects both our odd, historically deviant, post-Baby Boomer collective fascination with talking as a sign of intelligence (George Walker Bush was a moron because he clearly didn’t like talking, Barack Obama and John Kerry geniuses because they won’t shut up) and a complete misunderstanding of the man and his nature. The former is a topic for another day; for today, it’s enough to say that President Obama is and has been a legislator for over a decade, and that shows no signs of changing now that he calls the White House home.

I tend to write a great deal about foreign affairs, in no small part because the little I know and understand about that topic exceeds the little I know and understand about most domestic topics. In my lifetime, there have been seven Presidents, whose foreign policies ranged from the ineffective and hapless (Ford and Carter) to the insightful (George H.W. Bush and Clinton) to the chaotic (George W. Bush) to the world-historical (Reagan). One may or may not find much to recommend in the latter four presidencies’ policies, but the undeniable truth is that they led, and even Clinton’s talk of multilateralism was a thin cover for American unilateralism, when he felt action was necessary. (That he too often either did not feel action necessary, or shied away from it, is a different point.) Gerald Ford, the lifelong legislator, was at best a man out of his depth in foreign affairs, unable to do more than bow to Congress’s will on the one domain of the Presidency that is arguably most divorced from Congress’s will. Jimmy Carter simply should never have held any elective office above County Commissioner (and not even the Chairman of the Board), so completely awful was he at actually leading anything anywhere.

President Obama’s foreign policy has come in for a great deal of criticism from the right and center of the political spectrum, from his refusal of any sort of spine-stiffening where China is concerned, to his casual dismissal of our alliance with India, to his poor reception for the Prime Minister of Great Britain, to his worldwide apology tour. Ted Bromund has suggested that all of this comes of several possible bases, including the idea that the man simply has no foreign policy of which to speak, focusing instead domestically, as if the two spheres existed more or less in isolation. I think there’s something to that, but it misses a critical dimension: President Obama is treating foreign affairs as if he is but one legislator among many. He is compromising and building incremental coalitions that will likely accomplish little, giving what the world wants (American concessions) so that he may horsetrade favors later when America wants to achieve its ends. His congenital inability to create a consensus and impose it on his Cabinet, or other world leaders, is by this light a virtue to be praised, not a flaw to be ridiculed.

It is a wonderful approach to the world, marred only by its completely ridiculous nature and utter unlikelihood of ever succeeding.

It’s easy to see the pattern once you know what to look for: His view of the world is shaped by the post-Johnson liberal consensus that international legitimacy rises from a concert of nations acting as a single, collaborative body. We tend to think of this in the shorthand of the United Nations, but truthfully, any forum in which men gather to natter uselessly about the problems of the day, and then agree to do very little, would suffice. This is why the American Left screamed in sincere (if confused) rage at George W. Bush’s Iraq War coalition: The number of nations who joined America’s effort, including stalwart old allies like Britain and Poland, mattered little against the fact that Bush was perceived not to have gathered the coalition the right way.

President Obama’s expedition to the G-20 summit — an expedition praised by people who love to see other people talk about problems, rather than actually solving them — is emblematic. He went to the summit with clearly defined goals, sat and listened to others as they derided his goals and propounded theirs, left without achieving a single one of his, and declared the whole thing a success. While many would be tempted to use the word “rolled” to describe the President’s post-summit condition (I would be one of them), I think he accomplished his task. He went there to build a consensus to do things at a later time to mitigate the worldwide depression and prevent another. He left with a consensus to do things at a later time to mitigate the worldwide depression and prevent another. He no more cared whether America was at the lead than whether China was, so long as that consensus formed.

Again, that what he accomplished is not only at odds with what he thinks he accomplished, but also what he set out to accomplish, is not the point. He did the things that seemed natural to him: He joined in a consensus to achieve things later. The quasi-legislative process simply seemed right to him, and even better, it yielded the sort of ridiculous hash, as a result of a flurry of negotiations and compromises, that legislative work always does. He did not lead, he moved as part of the pack. It hit him in his legislator sweet spot.

President Obama’s incoherent foreign policy thus becomes procedurally coherent. He is not appeasing the genocidal bureaucrats in China, he is forming a working coalition with them. He is not so much slighting India and haplessly watching Pakistan slide into de jure (as opposed to years of de facto) civil war, he is balancing current legislative priorities. His Israel policy is shaped by a belief that there are other actors in the region who can and should be consulted on American priorities, so that they will help accomplish other ends later; Israel is but one legislator among many, even if it is a legislator near and dear to all but a small fraction of American hearts.

It’s also unsurprising that Americans, and especially media types, love this. Nothing happens, but everyone talks a great deal, and the result is … well, a great deal of talking. Americans have grown to love talking (I am no exception), and the term “chattering classes” exists for a reason. With no war or instance in which America obviously needs to act, and after eight years of a Presidency that acted dramatically if unevenly and haltingly, Americans correctly understood Candidate Obama’s promises to have unilateral talks with tyrants and to re-engage the world as promises not to do anything, but instead to speak endlessly. They voted for the change of no more change, and they got it.

It won’t last forever. It cannot. It may not even last the next 100 days. Put simply, Barack Obama believes that jaw-jaw forestalls forever war-war. Foreign policy, post-Metternich, is ninety-five percent jaw-jaw. The problem is, it does not, and never will, forestall the other five percent forever. And when it arrives, real leadership will be needed.

Thus far, there have been no real crises (other than a handful of emaciated pirates holding the captain of a merchant ship hostage, which truthfully barely qualifies as a presidential event, let alone a crisis of presidential leadership) to test whether those nations courted with apologies and promises of no intrusive American hand will follow President Obama’s lead, or roll him again. Given that many of those states, fresh with concessions in hand, continue to loudly bad-mouth the prison at Guantánamo Bay while loudly refusing to take in any of the prisoners there — refuse, in other words, to increase their prison populations by a bare handful — I don’t think we should be hopeful that their response to candy and flowers will be any better than was their response to President Bush’s stumbling entreaties.

But at least we’ll enjoy hearing President Obama asking.

Christopher Badeaux is a Senior Editor of The New Ledger.