Calculations we can believe in

In late October, while speaking to a group about the presidential election, I almost laughed out loud when a questioner in the audience asked me to expound on Barack Obama's "radical" agenda. Trying to be diplomatic, I politely told the guy that I didn't agree with his premise that Obama was a radical. This got me nowhere, of course, because one is not permitted to disagree, however politely, with someone who is suffused with blind certitude. The guy's voice went up a few notches: "HE'S A RADICAL!" Whatever. In response, I went off on some tangent, and the moment passed.

But I remembered that moment yesterday while watching Obama introduce the top-tier members of his foreign policy team - Hillary Clinton, Gen. James Jones, Robert Gates - none of whom opposed the Iraq war prior to its inception, all of whom have centrist/establishment credentials, some of whom are being cheered by the right, most of whom are viewed (at best) with skepticism by the left.

Yeah, that Obama is quite the "radical."

He's so "radical" that conservative commentator Fred Barnes, known in recent years as Karl Rove's journalistic muse, was inspired yesterday to enumerate his pleasures: "Clinton, for all her shortcomings, doesn't hail from the surrender-at-all-costs wing of the Democratic party...Jones, (despite being) an Iraq war skeptic, is a strong supporter of offshore drilling...Gates is no dove and no ally of the antiwar left." All told, Barnes happily wrote of Obama, "he's pragmatic so far in one direction - rightward. Who knew?" And on the Today show this morning, Rove himself said that Obama's picks are a signal of "continuity" rather than change.

Notably, prominent folks on the left don't seem to think that Obama is a "radical." Quite the contrary, they're feeling betrayed at the moment. For instance:

Commentator/activist David Sirota says that Obama is afraid to antagonize the "Washington ruling class," and he sneeringly observes, "We should be thankful when Dear Leader's whims serve the people - but also unsurprised when they don't." A blogger at the popular firedoglake website complains that Obama is content to "take our money" and then "punch us in the face." Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine, finds it "troubling" that Obama has "assembled a national security team of such narrow bandwidth" - particularly with respect to Gates, the Bush appointee who will remain at the Defense Department helm, thereby (in her words) "sending the message that even Democrats agree that Democrats can't run the military."

There's a pattern here. People with strong ideological convictions tend to see the Obama that they want to see. Many on the right (my elderly questioner, and the conservative crafters of a TV ad now on the air in Georgia) see Obama as a radical leftist...while many on the left, projecting their hopes and dreams, see Obama's "change" mantra as a harbinger for a new era of progressive governance.

But, as evidenced by his choice of foreign policy advisers, it's clear that Obama fits neither paradigm. And this should come as no surprise, because he has repeatedly demonstrated his pragmatic political instincts. Last June, liberals were heartbroken when he endorsed the congressional bill that gave President Bush virtually carte blanche on government eavesdropping - but I wrote that his liberal-base enthusiasts needed to get real: "He's a politician. And he wants to win."

It's the same deal now. Obama, calculating the political odds, wants to win at governance, so he is proceeding cautiously by seeking to build bridges in a bipartisan manner. Gates is a Republican who can help Obama build cred with Republicans. Jones, the next national security adviser, is a career military man who can help Obama build cred with the military. Clinton (among other things) is tight with the hawkish pro-Israel lobby, so she can help Obama build cred with skeptical Jewish groups if and when he engages in sensitive peace talks with Palestinians and Israelis.

Most importantly, when the stuff hits the fan (as it inevitably will), nobody in that triumverate can be easily caricatured by the right as a dovish peacenik. It's simply political reality that if Obama truly intends to close Guantanamo, sustain an Iraq withdrawal, and effectuate an overhaul of U.S. foreign policy (by upping the emphasis on "soft power"), it's probably smarter in the short run to entrust the sales job to someone like Gates, as opposed to, say, an alumnus of a liberal think tank.

This is a variation on the Nixon-goes-to-China principle of politics. A liberal president could never have opened relations with communist China in 1972, because the right would have attacked him mercilessly. But the old anti-communist warrior Richard Nixon could do it - and establish it as centrist American policy - because he had cred on the right.

Obama himself has written in his books that "I am bound to disappoint" many followers, precisely because they often "project their own views" on him, whereas he considers himself to be a bipartisan consenus-builder. Indeed, as biographer David Mendell told the liberal salon.com website late last month, "This has been the pattern for him historically - the left falls in love with him because of his eloquent oratory...but he has legislated from somewhere in the middle...He'll irritate people on both sides...the right expects him to be a Democrat, and the far left expects him to be one of them."

My advice for the left: Get some historical perspective. There has rarely been an effective president - Franklin D. Roosevelt being a classic example - that didn't tick off or confound his own followers from time to time. That's the nature of governance. It's an intricate business that requires savvy pragmatism. As evidenced by his national security picks, Obama is demonstrating that trait already. These are calculations that we can believe in.