In such circumstances, compiling the most liberal voting record in the US Senate made strategic sense – especially if the idea was to present a liberal alternative to Hillary Clinton, who had long telegraphed her intention to run for president as a centrist. Now, having won the greatest political prize in the world, all that remains for Obama is the verdict of history. “Success” will be defined, in large part, by the judgment of citizens of a country that remains, for the most part, center-right. And so he may conclude that a centrist approach makes sense.
Only time will tell whether an Obama presidency will defy his supporters’ best hopes and his opponents’ worst fears. Certainly, if he chooses to govern as a centrist, it will be better for the country than a dose of leftism. But it will also raise troubling questions about the core of the man America has elected – if there is one.
It’s possible, after all, that Obama’s vision and aspiration was more to win the presidency than to do anything meaningful once he got there. In a recent essay, professor and writer Joseph Epstein described the products of the Ivy League milieu from which Obama has emerged as “good students: those clever, sometimes brilliant, but rarely deep young men and women who, joining furious drive to burning if ultimately empty ambition, will do anything to get ahead.”
If Barack Obama is simply a “good student,” can he still be a great President?