The Obama Enigma :: Herbert I. London

President elect Barack Obama is an enigma, despite the fact he has gone through a grueling two year campaign for the presidency. The sealing of his birth certificate, Columbia and Harvard transcripts and even his baptismal certificate suggest he has something to hide. However, all of that is probably behind us now.

What lies ahead is another conundrum. Is Barack Obama a pragmatist who merely used affiliations with his church, community groups and questionable friendships to advance his career or is he an ideologue who was influenced by Farrakhan, Ayves, Wright, Khalidi and others on the hard left?

If the former, then many (most?) of the promises made during the campaign will have to be postponed or forgotten. Realists in the Obama camp, even the Keynesians, know that raising taxes in a recession only exacerbates economic conditions. Similarly, an attempt to redress the structural dislocation of some workers by redrafting trade agreements such as NAFTA is the equivalent of a 2009 Smoot-Hawley tariff.

Therefore the question is will Obama tack to the center or will he by nature, inclination and association retain a redistributionist psychology. In most circles, there is the hope that Obama is a dissimulator, put more politely, an opportunist who will say whatever is necessary to advance his position. However, this "optimistic" scenario suggests, he will do what is necessary to retain power, but will not veer to an extremist stance.

On the other hand, there are constituencies in the Democratic party that got Mr. Obama to where he is and expect to be rewarded. Union leaders want to abandon the secret ballot; ACORN and other community groups expect to receive government largess; the teachers' unions expect significant allocations for education; welfare organizations expect tax standards that encourage "spreading the wealth around." These groups will have to be mollified or an internal revolt in the Democratic party will ensue.

Can Obama steer a course between the Scylla of pragmatic policy decisions and the Charybdis of ideological commitment? Will this tension be addressed through some compromise or will it undermine his goals?

Since both the candidate and his policy perspectives are largely unknown, the resolution of this dilemma remains very much up in the air. Moreover, while President elect Obama has displayed the temperament of a patient man during the campaign, it is not at all clear whether he will maintain his equilibrium in the White House when the pressure is far more intense than the campaign trail.

Similarly, will President Obama withdraw from Iraq in fifteen months as he promised or will intelligence estimates suggest that such an accelerated move will trigger renewed violence jeopardizing the success achieved with the "surge?"

Again he will be put on the horns of a dilemma, notwithstanding the obvious condition of the media giving him a free ride whatever he decides to do. Yet expectations among his adherents run high. A messiah is supposed to move mountains and divide the sea, not simply offer compromises even if those compromises are shaded by fluorid rhetoric.

This will not be an easy adjustment for Obama. After the first year in the presidency, the fashionable racial argument will have worn thin, political correctness will most likely be less valuable as a defense mechanism and a public entranced by Camelot on Lake Michigan will be searching for answers to tough questions.

Clearly one hopes for the best and I certainly want to see Barack Obama succeed, but the questions looming ahead are tricky and the road to the future is filled with pitfalls.

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