..it makes sense for Obama to be reasonably moderate. He makes history simply by being a President with dark skin; what he desperately wants to avoid is for his Presidency to be seen as a disaster or a fiasco. Thus his sudden moderation on foreign policy: Obama is smart enough to understand that it is always possible for things to go wrong, but if the public perceives that an international setback is due to weakness, the President is in trouble. He's Jimmy Carter. If a President is perceived as tough on foreign policy and something goes wrong, voters will say that they're glad we have a hard guy in the White House.
In domestic policy Obama has more latitude, but here too it makes sense for him to play it safe. If he completes a mainstream Presidency successfully, he goes down in history. If he goes out on a limb and is marked down as a failure, it will be a setback for African Americans, more or less forever.
We've got several folks named. Emanuel, Clinton, Richardson, Geithner. All known quantities, none extraordinarily Left. Maybe Powerline is onto something. Is Obama tiptoeing? Moreover, is Zawahiri right? Dare we say?
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