Rest assured, America. Barack Obama has confidence in his own instincts again.

In the first two years of Obama’s presidency, his top aides had grown accustomed to a process in which Obama drew out and explored the views of his full team and searched for a consensus — decision by ballot, some called it.
Increasingly, however, that process has changed, according to a wide group of Obama’s personal friends, informal advisors and top aides interviewed during the spring. In recent months, they say, the president has been relying more heavily on his own instincts and feeling less impelled to seek accord among advisors.

Apparently his advisors can bore him quite a bit. The White House released this photo with the caption, “President Barack Obama listens during a meeting with advisors in the Oval Office, June 8, 2011.”

You may scoff at the notion of Obama not trusting his own amazing decision-making powers, but I had wondered if those self-comparisons to LeBron James were actually a very subtle form of self-criticism.

Finally, President Obama – author of two memoirs by the age of 45, speaker of the famous argument, “I won,” the man who famously assured his party that they wouldn’t endure a 1994-style shellacking because they had him, the man who gave an iPod of his speeches to the Queen of England, the man who claimed his election would trigger the falling of oceans and the healing of the sick, the man who believed the best candidate to be his chief of staff was himself – has overcome all of that crippling self-doubt.