The Two Obamas

The Obama who takes this approach in beating back Clinton's charges that he was raising "false hopes" (""Did JFK look up at the moon and say, 'Ah, false hope. Too far. Reality check. Can't do it.'?") is a stark contrast to the Obama profiled in the New Yorker several months ago. That Obama learned several lessons from his tragically idealistic parents, and adopted an incremental-change view of governance:

In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good.

That was the Obama that appealed to me, the one who adopted his process-oriented, democracy-enhancing political philosophy from Alexander Bickel and John Hart Ely (guys that con law nerds such as myself get excited about). But it sounds nothing like the Obama we hear on the trail now, the one who seems to be promising the Second Coming (of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Jesus Christ, or some combo of all three.) Maybe this is an example of the whole "campaigning in poetry and governing in prose" idea, but I sort of miss the other Obama, which might explain why I sound grumpy whenever I read idiotic posts like this one.