Extended Interview: Judge Abner Mikva Examines Obama's Leadership Style

MARGARET WARNER: So Judge Mikva, you have been, among many things you've done, counselor to the president in Washington. What tells you that Barack Obama has the management skills and the savvy, management savvy needed to run the presidency?

ABNER MIKVA: Well I think that the, the most recent and most perhaps important example of his management style is the campaign. Presidential campaigns are the most complicated organizations that I have ever seen. And what I've seen in Barack's campaign, as an observer, not as a paid participant, is that it has been so efficient. He has brought good people on to work with him.

He's learned who he can trust to make decisions for him. And what kind of decisions have to go up to him. This campaign has been almost glitch free. I say almost because obviously there're always stumbles in the road, but when you look back at the wintry day he announced for president last year and look to today, it's almost as if it's been the most experienced, efficient campaign that's ever been run. And yet, Barack has never run for president before, David Axelrod has been involved in a lot of campaigns, but he's never run a presidential campaign this far.

MARGARET WARNER: What kind of people does he surround himself with and rely on? What does he look for?

ABNER MIKVA: He looks for people that he can trust, but trust to him is not somebody that will agree with him and say "yes, yes, yes", but somebody who he can trust to disagree and say I think you're wrong. And not get angry. And one of the great traits that I find about Barack is that in all the years that I've known him, I have never seen him angry out of control. Does he get irritated about things, does he get unhappy, depressed, disgusted? But he's never out of control. That's a hard discipline to live up to.

MARGARET WARNER: How easy is it for him to recognize that the course he's gone down is the wrong course?

ABNER MIKVA: It's as hard as it is for most of us who have the colossal egos necessary to run for public office in the first place. On the other hand he has a very good built in system of, of providing the checks and balances he needs to not keep going in the wrong direction. One, of course, Michelle. He teases about it, but she really is his severest critic. She makes sure that he tows the line he says he's going to tow.

The other is that he, he understands people's reactions to things. I think for instance the way he handled the, the problems about Tony Rezko, this Illinois fundraiser for him and others that got himself into all kinds of trouble and was just convicted of bribery. He admits that he, he allowed the relationship to continue for longer than it should so that when Barack brought his house, he allowed Tony to participate in it in a way that looks bad and he wrestled with it for awhile and then he realized that all the temporizing and hemming and hawing wasn't going to do it and he took his records and went into the Tribune and spent a whole day with them to ask all the questions they wanted and he explained all the dealings he had had with Rezko, those he didn't, and when it came to came to the house and he said that was just a boneheaded thing and I made a bad mistake. And it hasn't gone away, but I think he handled it.

MARGARET WARNER: So if you think about a president in the Oval Office making a big decision, approaching a big decision like going to war, or whether to really launch a major legislative initiative, there's no one person who does all the synthesizing for him?

ABNER MIKVA: The closest thing I can compare is the Clinton modus operandi when I was White House council. And Bill Clinton had very capable advisers and he would listen to them, but the problem is that Clinton's listening capacity and sifting capacity was not always as good as it should be. There's be some advisers that he liked better than others and if somebody who was not one of those favorite advisers would come up with something that deferred from what the president was inclined to do, that would not count as much in the way.

I see Barack as listening to everybody who has something to say and not relying on his predispositions or who his favorite guru is.

MARGARET WARNER: Now he has taken some big chances in his life.

ABNER MIKVA: Well, he's a risk taker, but it's a calculated risk taker. He doesn't let a bunch of people sit around and say, oh do this, do this, hey, hey, and away they go. When I look at, understood the way they're financing this campaign was put together long before he announced how they were really going to use the Internet and pick up on what, what Chairman [Howard] Dean had started with the '04 campaign and really turn it into a major source of funds and major source of campaign volunteers. That was done on the calm. There was no blueprint that said to do this you'll get this result, but on the other hand, they did a lot of exploring and a lot of tinkering and talked to a lot of experts, and then he took the risk of taking on this campaign.

Even at that time, Barack's only money was the money he got from his book, and the idea that he was going to take on a several hundred million dollar campaign without a sue [ph] in the bank was pretty awesome. But he did it.

MARGARET WARNER: So the question about, though, being restless, impatient, taking on a lot, he said one of the first priorities is to get some sort of a health care -- universal health care in the first year. I mean you saw Bill Clinton bite off way more than he could chew. Is there that danger in Barack Obama that he, he doesn't calculate in the field that he doesn't know well he's, he's not good enough yet at calculating the risks.

ABNER MIKVA: No, I think he's calculated the risks. I think that's what he has learned from his years in the state legislature and his years in the Senate, the U.S. Senate, and his years in campaigning is that you have to put your priorities on a scale, and I think that health care may well be the number one issue and he's going to put some of the others on hold. He's not going to try to get it all done in the first hundred days.