This, from the president's chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Scott Johnson goes to town, in response. Rocco Landesman, the NEA chairman, said, in part: This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.