While many Americans look at a candidate’s position through a few issues and call it a day, few look at how each candidate views the presidency.

What is the presidency? Is it the stack of bills in the oval office waiting to be passed or vetoed, or is it a way of life — a state of being that permeates throughout the White House changing every four to eight years? Is it the mood that permeates throughout America and the world? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may have very few differences on how to tackle the issues, yet their one difference lies in how each perceives the presidency.

Clinton likens the presidency as, well, a job. She invokes Churchill when he said, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” Hillary suggests that we just need the right mechanic while Obama thinks we need a new car, as he looks to Lincoln: “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

If we need to change Washington and, concurrently, America, it is not enough to finish the job with the same tools we have always been given. Clinton portrays herself as the candidate ready to work at achieving her goals and attacks the job of the presidency as an executive, and above all, her dream job.

During a debate before the Nevada caucuses, Clinton claimed that the Office was analogous to that of a “chief executive officer” where one has “to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy.” Obama on the other hand, who confessed to having a messy office, states this: “It involves having a vision for where the country needs to go … and then being able to mobilize and inspire the American people to get behind that agenda for change.”

We cannot keep fueling the bureaucracy and carrying on the philosophical notion that the president is just a CEO (as Clinton suggests). We have had that mentality for years and it fails to speak to the ears of not only Americans but the world. How can Hillary claim she is a candidate of change when she wants to keep the old flames of Washington burning?

Perhaps their philosophical differences in the presidency may be attributed to their upbringing. As Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein ascribes, “Almost always, something holds her back from telling the whole story, as if she doesn’t trust the reader, listener, friend, interviewer, constituent — or perhaps herself — to understand the true significance of the events.” A former Clinton administration official, who read both Clinton’s “Living History” and Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” sees Obama as a person that has “struggled through difficult questions of identity and resolved them, and who, as a result, is comfortable not just with himself but with the complexity and contradiction of the world.”

It is Obama’s ability to be at ease with this complexity and contradiction that will enable him to not just get the “job” done, but also transform society. Obama has learned to trust himself to do the right thing and in turn trusts that most Americans will do the same.