Happy New Year!

I haven't blogged for a while, opting to focus on hot stove baseball and only occasionally ceding attention to the news of the world. I think I've been awaiting the moment when seemingly random and disconnected pieces of news, like notes tapped on a distant piano, form a recognizable pattern -- a melody -- and the randomness of it all suddenly disappears.

The music analogy is not entirely on point. What I'm talking about, and what I was hoping to discern from the cascade of events surrounding the Obama transition, is better described as a narrative. History is happening right now, but we are only privy to a small part of it. We learn about certain events or happenings through the distorted lens of the media, and we do our best to extrapolate from those data points the larger story that is unfolding. Or at least I do.

For those of us who crave a narrative (and who therefore assume history, in fact, is supposed to make sense), life becomes somewhat easier during presidential election years. For that is the time when the candidates and their followers make their narratives most explicit. For example, Democratic opinion-makers generally portrayed Bush as a reckless imbecile who was responsible for destroying America's moral standing in the world. This offered people a convenient framework for understanding the events of the last eight years, which they could supplement with their own observations and suppositions.

It's worth pointing out that, the more one knows, the more complicated the task of finding and adhering to a satisfactory narrative becomes. A person who knows next to nothing about current events could choose to believe either that Bush is a reckless imbecile or that he's been a great defender of freedom. For a person lacking a reasonable grasp of the facts, there would be no occasion for information to come up tending to dispel the chosen narrative. They can literally believe whatever they want. For people who are very well informed, on the other hand, it takes a lot more care and thinking in order to formulate a narrative, because they will be constantly forced to deal with facts and opinions that don't seem to fit. Ultimately, dealing with such inconsistencies is likely to involve accepting that the truth is not as clear or as simple as initially imagined. A person who sets out believing FDR was a near god-like leader is going to have to reconsider that appraisal once confronted with the reality of Court-packing or the internment of Japanese-Americans, for example. Ultimately, such a person is likely to qualify their praise for Roosevelt or even change his or her mind completely.

Getting back to more recent events, I am forced to revisit my pre-election assessment of Barack Obama. As various previous blogposts will attest, I came to see Barack Obama as something of a crypto-socialist who was using America's hunger for inspiration as a means to obscure his true leftist agenda. In my view, there was plenty of evidence for both strands of this narrative, i.e., that Obama was indeed a man of the Left, and that his popular support was mainly a product of emotionalism and symbolism.

Happily, I can now say nothing has happened since the election to sustain the impression that Obama is a radical leftist. In fact, if he is a crypto-anything, it seems most likely he's a crypto-centrist. There is simply no way to interpret his actions during the transition in a manner consistent with those of a true leftist.

Start with his appointments. He retained Bush's Defense Secretary, tapped Hillary for State, and assembled an economic team Wall Street wizards can appreciate. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is a solid liberal but also a strong supporter of Israel.

Beyond these personnel decisions, Obama has expressed sympathy for Israel's attack against Hamas and seems completely uninterested in pursuing legal actions against Bush Administration officials involved in the "torture" controversy. He has expressly downgraded the prospects for implementing major portions of the sweeping domestic agenda he outlined during the campaign due to the exigencies of the present economic crisis (which he apparently thinks will be of long duration). He has nominally included a host of tax cuts in his stimulus plan (although there is reason to question the characterization of those measures as tax cuts). On top of all that, his attitude toward Bush and the outgoing administration appears to be one of at least token respect. He has done nothing to fan the attitude of contempt toward Bush that liberals have stoked over the last eight years. No wonder various quarters of the left seem dazed and confused.

I am by no means ready to climb out on a limb and declare that the conventional, centrist Obama I've perceived over the last eight weeks or so is the real Obama. (Hell, he's not even president yet!) But the narrative to which I previously adhered no longer fits. For now at least, what seems to make the most sense goes something like this:

Obama doesn't have a clear political ideology. He is a thoughtful, introspective guy who became fixated on issues of race and personal identity due to his unconventional background and upbringing. In his lifelong search for a way to fit in, he has gravitated toward people with strong leftist views, but has never internalized leftist doctrine as a practical or effective governing philosophy. He is comfortable in leftist circles, but he doesn't really buy into the program. In this sense, he is not unlike professed Catholics who go to Mass and appreciate the company of other Catholics, but who don't truly believe in the Resurrection of Christ.

Obama's sentimental attachment to leftism made it easy for him to attract the support of both inner-city blacks and upper class whites in Chicago. His looks and oratorical skills made him a phenomenon. Finally, sheer luck placed him in a position to enter the national stage at a time when the country was practically begging for the chance to elect someone who had opposed the war in Iraq.

Even with all he had going for him, it still took a brilliant campaign, a flawed Republican opponent, and a major financial crisis to put Obama into the White House. Looking back, however, Obama was never required to really reveal his true ideological colors, whatever they were. Liberals were encouraged to believe he was one of them. Moderates and conservatives were given assurances that they had nothing to fear.

Now that Obama has been elected, it appears to be the lefties who are holding the short straw. The new president is not a taller version of Dennis Kucinich. He may be nothing more than a less roguish version of Bill Clinton. In fact, one cannot rule out the possibility that he's a younger and hipper version of George H.W. Bush.

An Obama who is not innately driven to pursue a particular ideological agenda is more likely to be motivated by a fear of spectacular failure in office rather than a hunger for spectacular success. I don't think I have ever heard anyone make this point, but if Obama is really invested in the idea of being the first black president, he may well feel a lot of internal pressure not to ruin the prospects for future black candidates by making a total botch of it. The same notion arguably applies to his youth and inexperience: perhaps he feels the need simply to prove he can handle the job, whatever that means in terms of taking the country in a particular direction. In short, it is easy to imagine that Obama's top priority is simply to not screw up royally.

Obama's actions to date, as discussed above, would seem consistent with that objective. For one thing, they appear calculated to neutralize his opponents. Republicans have lowered their daggers completely. Apart from their stiffening resistance to bailouts -- a position that started to take hold before the election -- the GOP is more focused on charting a new strategy for attracting voters than in giving Obama a hard time. And as for potential critics within his party, Obama could scarcely have done more since the election to woo fans of the Clintons than if he had invited Bill and Hillary to move back into the White House with him.

If my hypothesis is correct, and Obama is really underneath it all a conventional Washington moderate who is more interested in keeping the wheels on the country than in delivering radical change, it does not mean he will consistently disappoint the liberals who so passionately supported him over Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Obama is going to need to make good on at least some of his promises to them. His impending presidential order to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay is a timely example, and may demonstrate the limits of Obama's ability to abandon commitments made to his liberal base during the campaign. Those kinds of discrete actions, however, will seem like thin gruel to frustrated lefties who are aching for a truly transformative epoch in American politics.

As I said, this is not a final verdict on Obama's political identity, but merely a new working theory. As events unfold, they will tend to either confirm or cast doubt on this hypothesis. Hopefully, they will confirm it, because the Barack Obama I am describing today is not nearly as scary as the one I thought existed a few months ago.