Notes on the Obama Transition, I

If hope was a rhetorical abstraction that defined the Obama brand, then change was a tangible desire that his supporters sought to concretize immediately after his election. In their minds change entailed a decisive repudiation of both President Bush's policies and any Democrats who may have enabled them. It was clear to me after his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, and clearer now that his cabinet has begun to take form, that Mr. Obama is going to disappoint the minions who thought him more left-wing than he turns out to be. The moderate, establishment hue of his appointments is all one needs to prove this assertion.

It is now also clear who was right and who was wrong about his ideological position. Conservative activists, radio talk show hosts, and Fox News pundits were terribly mistaken to smear him as a radical socialist, though their intellectually bankrupt campaign had little else going for it but crazed scare tactics. Young liberals, who were moved to vote for him due more to style than substance and who I can personally confirm knew little to nothing of his platform (on election night I spoke to several who had no idea of his plans for Afghanistan), were wrong to assume his youth and inexperience implied a radicalism of which they would approve.

It seems the people who adjudged him correctly were the conservatives who crossed ideological lines to endorse him, like Christopher Buckley, Andrew Sullivan, Jeffrey Hart (former National Review editor and Reagan speechwriter), and Mickey Edwards (former Republican congressman and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation) and those who wrote favorably of him, like David Brooks and David Frum. They saw him as a consensus-driven, prudent, nonpartisan, soft liberal, and someone in the mainstream of economic and foreign policy thought. Since the election they have been vindicated by his demeanor, his staff selections, his recantation on imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies, and his support for Joe Lieberman's continued chairmanship in the Senate.

The far left was also correct about Mr. Obama and are probably unsurprised by his actions since the election. People like Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader (who in a racist tirade called the president-elect an "Uncle Tom") and many writers at The Nation warned Mr. Obama was a neoliberal shill for the financial sector (he far outpaced Mr. McCain in contributions from Wall Street) and was too weak to confront corporate power or the foreign policy establishment. So despite the differing grammar of their assessments and their evaluations of what his centrism and conciliatory disposition mean, the "Obamacons" and the far left seem to have had the most accurate analysis of the man who will soon be president.