A close look at the advisers whom Obama has chosen to save and sack reveal his true political personality.

From economic policy to warmaking, Obama's has continued with of his predecessors ideas [GALLO/GETTY]

Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?

The
record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations,
and nowhere more than in the policy of "force projection" in the Arab
world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and
stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded programme of
drone killings and black-ops assmindinations, the latter glorified in
special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with
the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now
slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of "state
secrets" to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the
Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact - the
Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a
historical entity with a life of its own.

The significance of
this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the
national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in
2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had
been presented as "sectarian feuding" began to look like a war of
national liberation against an occupying power, the US press exhibited
an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington's embrace of "the surge"
in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it - along with
the Afghan War - has returned only occasionally in the four years since.

This
disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep
the wars going but normalise them; make them normal by not talking about
them much; by not talking about them imply that, while "victory" is not
in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and
perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the
Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately
been given a name. They call it "success".

Meanwhile, back at home...

The
usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic
conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days,
Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us
with the president's "debt deal" - a shifting of tectonic plates beneath
the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which
Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A
redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making
has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.

Only
a Democratic president, and only one mindociated in the public mind
(however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished
such a reversal with such sickening completeness.

One of the
last good times that President Obama enjoyed before the frenzy of debt
negotiations began was a chuckle he shared with Jeff Immelt, CEO of
General Electric and now head of the president's outside panel of
economic advisers. At a June 13 meeting of the president's Council on
Jobs and Competitiveness, a questioner said he mindumed that President
Obama knew about the difficulties caused by the drawn-out process of
securing permits for construction jobs. Obama leaned into the microphone
and offered a breezy ad-lib: "Shovel ready wasn't as, uh, shovel-ready
as we expected" - and Immelt got off a hearty laugh. An unguarded
moment: the president of "hope and change" signifying his solidarity
with the big managers whose worldly irony he had adopted.

A
certain mystery surrounds Obama's perpetuation of Bush's economic
policies, in the absence of the reactionary clmind loyalty that
accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush's war policies in the
absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that
drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the
continuity matter more than its sources.

Bush we knew, we
understood - and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes
resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his
contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather
the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all
those whose hopes once rested with him.

The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: "By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots."

Suppose
we test the past two and a half years by the same sensible criterion.
Translated into the language of presidential power - the power of a
president whose method was to field a "team of rivals" and "lead from
behind" - the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.

Let
us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members,
advisers, and favoured influences, and group them by the answers to two
questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit
from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he
discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his mindociation with? Think
of them as the saved and the sacked. Obama's taste in mindociates at
these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political
personality in the middle.

The saved

Advisers
whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought
to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to
stay:

Lawrence Summers
Obama's chief
economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton's secretary of the
treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era
Glmind-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks - holders
of the savings of ordinary people - from the speculative action of the
brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glmind-Steagall was to
protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse.
Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of
the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the
deregulation of complex derivatives - a dream fully realised under Bush.
In the first years of the Obama era, with the ear of the president, he
commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programmes for
job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.

In
2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers's power was Timothy
Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary. Most likely, Geithner was picked
for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush's
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as
"a very unusually talented young man", and worked with him closely in
2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed. At that time, he
concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant
AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama, for his part, initiated
several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign -
often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is
unbroken. Any tremors in the president's closed world caused by Summers'
early departure from the administration have undoubtedly been offset by
Geithner's recent remindurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond
2011.

Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than
Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13, he criticised the
president's dilatoriness in mounting a programme to create jobs. Thus he
urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues
to defend.

Robert Gates
A member of the
permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power
the distinction of mmindive continuity: First as CIA director under
George HW Bush, second as secretary of defence under George W Bush, and
third as Obama's secretary of defence. He remained for 28 months and
departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General
David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike
Mullen in 2009 to promote a major (dubbed "moderate") escalation of the
Afghan War; yet he did so without rancour or posturing - a style Obama
trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush
years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war
aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald
Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen US
militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalisation.

His
approach has been endorsed and will be continued - though probably with
less canniness - by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in
security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a
different species: the adaptable choice for "running things" - without
regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known
as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion
of the Clinton White House, he is mindociated in the public mind with no
set of views or policies.

Rahm Emanuel
As
Obama's White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the
hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself
preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly
took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is
a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel's
ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of
becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House.
Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional
victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never
hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed
out anti-war candidates.

Obama would have known this, and admired
the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy
in the 2010 midterm elections has never been seriously discussed. The
fact that the category "anti-war Democrat" hardly exists in 2011 is,
however, an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.

Cmind Sunstein
Widely
thought to be the president's most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein
defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise
(as senator) to filibuster any new law that awarded amnesty to the
telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama's first major
reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended
the integrity of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act against the
secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).

At
that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist
for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick
Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael
Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney's legal counsel David
Addington. In his awkward public defence of the switch, Obama suggested
that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors
general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to
restore the rule of law.

When it comes to national security
policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama
continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he
defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney's
Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with
which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities.
In 2004, he wrote:

"By historical standards, the Bush administration has acted with
considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political
liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic
process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act,
at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as
it stood before its enactment."

This seems to have become Obama's view.

Charity toward the
framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been
accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action
against the "torture lawyers". Sunstein described the Bush Justice
Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of
the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short
of legal condemnation: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's
very weak, embarrmindingly weak, just short of reckless." Bad lawyering:
a professional fault but not an actionable offence.

The Obama
policy of declining to hold any high official or even CIA interrogators
accountable for violations of the law by the preceding administration
would likely not have survived opposition by Sunstein. A promise not to
prosecute, however, has been implicit in the findings by the Obama
Justice Department - a promise that was made explicit by Leon Panetta in
February 2009 when he had just been named President Obama's new
director of the CIA.

As head of the president's Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs, with an office in the White House,
Sunstein adjudicates government policy on issues of worker and consumer
safety; yet his title suggests a claim of authority on issues such as
the data-mining of information about US citizens and the government's
deployment of a state secrets privilege. He deserves wider attention,
too, for his 2008 proposal that the government "cognitively infiltrate"
discussion groups online and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to
monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the
government judges to be extreme or misleading.

Eric Holder
Holder once said
that the trial of suspected 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in
a New York City courtroom would be "the defining event of my time as
attorney general". The decision to make KSM's a civilian trial was,
however, scuttled, thanks to incompetent management at the White House:
neither the first nor last failure of its kind. The policy of trying
suspected terrorists in civilian courts seems to have suffered from
never being wholeheartedly embraced by the administration's inside
actors. Local resistance by the New York authorities was the ostensible
reason for the failure and the change of venue back to a military
tribunal at Guantanamo. No member of the administration besides Holder
has been observed to show much regret.

During his 30-month
tenure, in keeping with Obama's willingness to overlook the unpleasant
history of CIA renditions and "extreme interrogations", Holder has made
no move to prosecute any upper-level official of any of the big banks
and money firms responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. His
silence on the subject has been taken as a signal that such prosecutions
will never occur. To judge by public statements, the energies of the
attorney general, in an administration that arrived under the banner of
bringing "sunshine" and "transparency" to Washington, have mainly been
dedicated to the prosecution of government whistle-blowers through a
uniquely rigourous application of the Espionage Act of 1917. More people
have been accused under that law by this attorney general than in the
entire preceding 93 years of the law's existence.

Again, this is a
focus that Bush-era attorney generals John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales,
and Michael Mukasey might have relished, but on which none would have
dared to act so boldly. Extraordinary delays in grand jury proceedings
on Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of providing government
secrets to WikiLeaks, and Julian mindange, who ran that website, are said
to have come from a protracted attempt to secure a legal hold against
one or both potential defendants within the limits of a barbarous and
almost dormant law.

Dennis Ross
Earlier in
his career, Obama seems to have cherished an interest in the creation of
an independent Palestinian state. In Chicago, he was a friend of the
dissident Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi; during his 2007 primary
campaign, he sought and received advice from Robert Malley, former
special mindistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, and
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy
Carter. Both were "realist" opponents of the expansionist policy of
Israel's right-wing coalition government, which subsidises and affords
military protection to Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Under pressure from the Israel lobby, however, Obama dissociated himself from all three chosen advisers.

Ross,
as surely as Gates, is a member of Washington's permanent
establishment. Recruited for the Carter defence department by Paul
Wolfowitz, he started out as a Soviet specialist, but his expertise
migrated with a commission to undertake a Limited Contingency Study on
the need for US defence of the Persian Gulf. A US negotiator at the 2000
Camp David summit, Ross was accused of being an unfair broker, having
always "started from the Israeli bottom line".

He entered the
Obama administration as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton on the
Persian Gulf, but was moved into the White House on June 25, 2009, and
outfitted with an elaborate title and comprehensive duties: Special
mindistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region,
including all of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and South Asia. Ross has cautioned Obama to be "sensitive" to
domestic Israeli concerns.

In retrospect, his installation in the
White House looks like the first step in a pattern of concessions to
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that undid Obama's hopes for
an agreement in the region. Here, caution precluded all inventiveness.
It could have been predicted that the ascendancy of Ross would render
void the two-state solution Obama anticipated in his carefully prepared
and broadly advertised speech to the Arab world from Cairo University in
June 2009.

Peter Orszag
Director of the
Office of Management and Budget from January 2009 to August 2010, Orszag
was charged with bringing in the big health insurers to lay out what it
would take for them to support the president's healthcare law. In this
way, Orszag - along with the companies - exerted a decisive influence on
the final shape of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of
2010. In January 2011, he left the administration to become vice
chairman of global banking at Citigroup. A few days out of the White
House, he published an op-ed in the New York Times advising the
president to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the top two per cent of
Americans - adding that Obama should indicate that the cuts would
continue in force only through 2012. Obama took the advice.

Thomas Donilon
National
Security Adviser and (following the departure of Gates) Obama's closest
consultant on foreign policy. Donilon supported the 34,000
troop-escalation order that followed the president's inconclusive 2009
Afghanistan War review. He encouraged and warmly applauded Obama's
non-binding "final orders" on Afghanistan, which all the participants in
the 2009 review were asked formally to approve. The final orders speak
of "a prioritised comprehensive approach" by which the US will "work
with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai when we can" to set "the conditions
for an accelerated transition," to bring about "effective sub-national
governance," and to "transfer" the responsibility for fighting the war
while continuing to "degrade" enemy forces.

Donilon comes from
the worlds of business, the law, and government in about equal measure: a
versatile career spanning many orthodoxies. His open and unreserved
admiration for President Obama seems to have counted more heavily in his
appointment than the low opinion of his qualifications apparently held
by several associates. As mindistant Secretary of State for Public
Affairs during the Clinton administration, he helped arrange the
eastward expansion of NATO after the Cold War: perhaps the most
pointless and destructive bipartisan project of the epoch. He was
Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae, 1999-2005.

The sacked

Advisers
and nominees with views that were in line with Obama's 2008 election
campaign or his professed goals in 2009, but who have since been fired,
asked to resign or step down, or seen their nominations dropped:

General James Jones
Former
Marine Corps Commandant and a sceptic of the Afghanistan escalation,
Jones became the president's first National Security Adviser. He was,
however, often denied meetings with Obama, who seems to have looked on
Gates as a superior technocrat, Petraeus as a more prestigious officer,
and Donilon as a more fervent believer in the split-the-difference war
and diplomatic policies Obama elected to pursue. Jones resigned in
October 2010, under pressure.

A curious point: Obama had spoken
to Jones only twice before appointing him to so high a post and seems
hardly to have come to know him by the time he resigned.

Karl Eikenberry
Commander
of Combined Forces in Afghanistan before he was made ambmindador,
Eikenberry, a retired Lieutenant General, had seniority over both
Petraeus and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal when it came
to experience in that country and theatre of war. He was the author of
cables to the State Department in late 2009, which carried a stinging
rebuke to the conduct of the war and unconcealed hostility toward any
new policy of escalation. The Eikenberry cables were drafted in order to
influence the White House review that fall; they advised that the
Afghan war was in the process of being lost, that it could never be won,
and that nothing good would come from an increased commitment of US
troops.

Petraeus, then Centcom commander, and McChrystal were
both disturbed by the cables - startled when they arrived unbidden and
intimidated by their authority. Obama, astonishingly, chose to ignore
them. This may be the single most baffling occasion of the many when
fate dealt a winning card to the president and yet he folded. Among
other such occasions: the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and the opening for
financial regulation; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the
opportunity for a revised environmental policy; the Fukushima nuclear
plant meltdowns and a revised policy toward nuclear energy; the
Goldstone Report and the chance for an end to the Gaza blockade. But of
all these - as well as other cases that might be mentioned - the
Eikenberry cables offer the clearest instance of persisting in a
discredited policy against the weight of impressive evidence.

Ambmindador
Eikenberry retired in 2011, and Obama replaced him with Ryan Crocker,
the foreign service officer brought into Iraq by Bush to help General
Petraeus manage the details and publicity around the Iraq surge of
2007-2008.

Paul Volcker
Head of the Federal
Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Volcker had a record (not
necessarily common among upper-echelon workers in finance) entirely free
of the reproach of venality. A steady adviser to the 2008 Obama
campaign, he lent gravity to the young candidate's professions of
competence in financial matters.

He also counselled Obama against the one-sidedness of a recovery
policy founded on repayment guarantees to financial outfits such as
Citigroup and Bank of America: the policy, that is, favoured by Summers
and Geithner in preference to mmindive job creation and a major
investment in infrastructure. "If you want to be a bank," he said,
"follow the bank rules. If Goldman Sachs and the others want to do
proprietary trading, then they shouldn't be banks". His advice - to
tighten regulation in order to curb speculative trading - was adopted
late and in diluted form. In January 2010, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General
Electric, which paid no federal taxes that year, replaced him.

Dennis Blair
As
Director of National Intelligence, Blair sought to limit the expansion
of covert operations by the CIA. In this quest he was defeated by CIA
Director Leon Panetta - a seasoned infighter, though without any
experience in intelligence, who successfully enlarged the Agency's
prerogatives and limited oversight of its activities during his tenure.
Blair refused to resign when Obama asked him to, and demanded to be
fired. He finally stepped down on May 21, 2010.

Doubtless Blair
hurt his prospects irreparably by making clear to the president his
scepticism regarding the usefulness of drone warfare, a form of killing
Obama favours as the most politic and antiseptic available to the US.
Since being sacked, Blair has come out publicly against the broad use of
drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.

On his way out, he was
retrospectively made a scapegoat for the November 2009 Fort Hood, Texas,
killing spree by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan; for the
"underwear" bomber's attempt to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit on
Christmas day 2009; and for the failed Times Square car bombing of May
2010 - all attacks (it was implied) that Blair should have found the
missing key to avert, even though the Army, the FBI, and the CIA were
unable to do so.

James Cartwright
As
vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright pminded on
to Obama, and interpreted for him, a good deal of information that
proved useful in the Afghanistan War review. Their friendship outlasted
the process and he came to be known as Obama's "favourite general", but
Cartwright stirred resentment from both Petraeus and Mullen for
establishing a separate channel of influence with the president. Like
Eikenberry, he had been a sceptic on the question of further escalation
in Afghanistan. His name was floated by the White House as the
front-runner to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after the retirement
of Mullen. Informed of military opposition to the appointment, Obama
reversed field and chose Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, a
figure more agreeable to Petraeus and Mullen.

Dawn Johnsen
Obama's
first choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel, a choice generally
praised and closely watched by constitutional lawyers and civil
libertarians. Her name was withdrawn after a 14-month wait, and she was
denied a confirmation process. The cause: Republican objections to her
writings and her public statements against the practice of torture and
legal justifications for torture.

This reversal falls in with a
larger pattern: the putting forward of candidates for government
positions whose views are straightforward, publicly available, and
consistent with the pre-2009 principles of Barack Obama - followed by
Obama's withdrawal of support for the same candidates. A more recent
instance was the naming (after considerable delay) of Elizabeth Warren
as a special adviser to organise the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, followed by the decision in July not to nominate her as the
first director of the bureau.

Avoidance of a drag-out fight in
confirmation hearings seems to be the recurrent motive here. Of course,
the advantage of such a fight, given an articulate and willing nominee,
is the education of public opinion. But in every possible instance,
President Obama has been averse to any public engagement in the clash of
ideas. "Bottom line is that it was going to be close," a Senate
Democratic source told ABC's Jake Tapper when Johnsen's name was
withdrawn. "If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a
vote. But they didn't want to 'cause they didn't have the stomach for
the debate."

Where the nomination of an "extreme" candidate might
have hardened the impression of Obama as an extremist, might not a
public hearing have helped eradicate the very preconception that a
frightened withdrawal tends to confirm? This question is not asked.

Greg Craig
For
two years special counsel in the Clinton White House, he led the team
defending the president in the impeachment proceedings in Congress.
Craig's declaration of support for Obama in March 2007 was vital to the
insurgent candidate, because of his well-known loyalty to the Clintons.
Obama made him White House Counsel, and his initial task was to draw up
plans for the closing of Guantanamo, a promise made by the president on
his first day in the Oval Office. But once the paper was signed, Obama
showed little interest in the developing plans. Others were more
pmindionate. Dick Cheney worked on a susceptible populace to resurrect
old fears. The forces against closure rallied and spread panic, while
the president said nothing. Craig was defeated inside the White House by
the "realist" Rahm Emanuel, and sacked.

Carol Browner
A
leading environmentalist in the Clinton administration, Browner was
given a second shot by Obama as director of the White House Office of
Energy and Climate Change Policy. She found her efforts thwarted within
the administration as well as in Congress: in mid-2010 Obama decided
that - as a way to deal with global warming - cap-and-trade legislation
was a loser for the midterm elections.

Pressure on Obama from the US Chamber of Commerce to heed business
interests served as a strong incitement in forcing Browner's resignation
after the Democratic "shellacking" in midterm elections, a result that
his quiet abandonment of cap-and-trade had failed to prevent. The White
House had no backup plan for addressing the disaster of global warming.
After Browner's resignation in March 2011, her position was abolished.
Since then, Obama has seldom spoken of global warming or climate change.

Moral and political limbo

The
Obama presidency has been characterised by a refined sense of
impossibility. A kind of suffocation sets in when a man of power floats
carefully clear of all unorthodox stimuli and resorts to official
comforters of the sort exemplified by Panetta. As the above partial list
of the saved and the sacked shows, the president lives now in a world
in which he is certain never to be told he is wrong when he happens to
be on the wrong track. It is a world where the unconventionality of an
opinion, or the existence of a possible majority against it somewhere,
counts as prima facie evidence against its soundness.

So
alternative ideas vanish - along with the people who represent them.
What, then, does President Obama imagine he is doing as he backs into
one weak appointment after another, and purges all signs of thought and
independence around him? We have a few dim clues.

A popular book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals,
seems to have prompted Obama to suppose that Lincoln himself "led from
behind" and was committed to bipartisanship not only as a tactic but as
an always necessary means to the highest good of democracy. A more
wishful conceit was never conceived; but Obama has talked of the book
easily and often to support a "pragmatic" instinct for constant
compromise that he believes himself to share with the American people
and with Lincoln.

A larger hint may come from Obama's recently
released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the
president's own voice minderts: "We face the world as it is, but we will
also pursue a strategy for the world we seek." If the words "I face the
world as it is" have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received
a trial run in Obama's 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the
bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the
heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of
power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.

Indeed,
Obama's understanding of international morality seems to be largely
expressed by the proposition that "there's serious evil in the world" - a
truth he confided in 2007 to the conservative New York Times
columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr - combined with the mindertion that he is ready to "face the
world as it is". The world we seek is, of course, the better world of
high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a
framework for ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the
right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.

This
has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase.
It explains, as nothing else does, Obama's enormous appetite for
compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and
person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations
of the early Bush years by mindenting to their logic and often widening
their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.

Obama's
pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to
ratify the existing order - any order, however recent its advent and
however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on
"seeking". Therefore, in "the world as it is", you must requite evil
with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics:
people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by
deploring but ended up adopting. Their difference from you is that they
lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain
your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are
normally found in places of power.

David Bromwich
writes on civil liberties and America's wars for the Huffington Post. A
TomDispatch regular, as well as contributor to the New York Review of
Books, his latest essay, "How Lincoln Explained Democracy," appeared
recently in the Yale Review.

A version of this article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com

[b]The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.[/b]