The Great Deferrer

An addendum to my previous post on my grand theory of Obama as a great deferrer.

Ross Douthat, similarly, (but more succinctly) summed up Obama's leadership style in a recent column:

Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.

Douthat continues,

Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.

They’re wrong. Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.

It's worth reading the whole thing because I think it is a pretty accurate characterization of Obama. Douthat concludes by observing:

This leaves him walking a fine line. If Obama’s presidency succeeds, it will be a testament to what ideology tempered by institutionalism can accomplish. But his political approach leaves him in constant danger of losing center and left alike — of being dismissed by independents as another tax-and-spender, and disdained by liberals as a sellout.

This is absolutely right, with one minor exception. If Obama loses the "center" and left it will be for the same simple reason: independents and liberals alike will perceive, rightly, that the president's continued deferral to powerful interests means he is not acting in their own. And this of course only helps Republicans politically. They can go out and make the argument that big government means bad government. And at this rate, they'll have the evidence to prove it.