A Mere Mortal

I caught a bit of flack a while back when I posted a couple of posts where I dared to say that "the One" was just a mortal Chicago politician. Well I may not have been so far off base after all.

Victor Davis Hanson detects in Barack Obama's early personnel decisions "the outline of one of most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history, predicated on the mass appeal of a magnetic leader rather than any principles per se." In this account, "Obama is a masterful politician who never has had any real ideology or persona other than his own diversity story and history, youth, and charisma that together allow him to be whatever is politically expedient at the time."

Hanson's view is consistent with Obama's actions to date as president-elect but, as I have argued elsewhere, hardly compelled by them. But I think Hanson is probably correct with respect to the issue he focuses the most on -- the prosecution of the war on terror, narrowly defined. It would make no sense for Obama to take a soft line when it comes to going after terrorists, and Obama is a sensible politician.

After he practically reassembled the entire Clinton administration (that's change?) it should not be all that surprising that he has backtracked from his hard line position on such key issues as the prosecution of the war on terror and Iraq. After all what else does it mean that Obama kept someone as key to the status quo (vis a vis Iraq) as Robert Gates?

This is not an "I told you so" post - as much as it should be. However, it is my hope that a cold shot of reality will help bring cooler heads to the table when it comes to talking about solving the issues that are important to the country.

UPDATE - Heh apparently the Washington Times is recognizing these trends as well.

From the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos to National Review and the Washington Times - and all the mainstream media in between commentators are puzzling over who the dickens President-elect Barack Obama really is. On the progressive left, they are beginning to fear he may not be for "redistributive justice." On the Wall Street Journal free market right they are seeing, in his economic team, the possibility that he is really as safe to capitalism as a banker. Karl Rove has concluded that "Mr. Obama's economic team was reassuring. He's generally surrounded himself with intelligent, mainstream advisers."

Those impassioned by the anti-war slogan no blood for oil are getting nervous. According to Politico, Jodie Evans, a Code Pink co-founder who with her husband helped raise a lot of money for Mr. Obama during the primary and general election, recalled her interaction with Mr. Obama: "It has gotten to the point where he sees me coming and before I am close he just keeps repeating, 'Jodie, I PROMISE, I will end the war, I promise I will end the war.' "

I tried to tell ya he was just a politician.