Why Obama keeps his friends close, his enemies even closer

Barack Obama’s choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, his retention of Defence Secretary Robert Gates and his reliance on much of the same economic team that bequeathed us the current financial implosion has led many supporters to wonder whether his promise of change amounts to little more than spare change.

Others say he’s simply being shrewd, employing establishment figures to enact a transformative agenda.

He appears to be following the dictum reputedly made famous in his favourite film, The Godfather: “Hold your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Those who had hoped for a more decisive departure from the politics of recent years may have wishfully imputed more liberal instincts to Obama than are justified by his mostly centrist policy positions.

Granted, his social justice rhetoric and experience as a ground-level community organiser invite hopes of a progressive populist.

But Obama was also brought up in the elite precincts of the Ivy League and attended the Chicago school of cutthroat politics where high-minded principles are quickly ground to dust.

Obama couldn’t have got where he was determined to go without learning essential survival skills, including an ability to blend easily into the very different worlds in which he moved.

Given his hybrid identity and harsh apprenticeship, Obama may simply be a split-the-difference pragmatist. Or he may represent a new genre of politician for a post-partisan age, a “both-and” leader seeking to break out of the either-or dichotomies that so bedevil politics as we know it.

Is he looking to forge the kinds of lowest-common-denominator compromise found in legislative sausage-making in democracies the world over?

Or does he seek to foster an altogether different dynamic, integrating the best ideas from competing constituencies into hybrid solutions to problems for which no single approach provides an effective answer?

It’s too soon to say, but Obama’s personality, personal odyssey and political education all suggest that by both nature and nurture he is indeed a hybrid figure.

The inherent ambiguity of his mixed-race ancestry presented him with more daunting challenges than had he been of either race alone. Obama spent his youth in often anguished attempts to reconcile the two identities embodied in the original sin of slavery.

His first book, Dreams From My Father, reveals with remarkable candour and self-reflection a youth inspired by his mother’s secular Sixties idealism, but repelled by the enervating culture wars it precipitated. His singular achievement was to transform his greatest struggle into his greatest strength.

Obama is thus perhaps best seen as a potentially transformational figure in American and global politics.

If his background and beliefs reveal any consistent inclination, it is not so much to challenge the right but to question the very notion that rightness is the exclusive possession of any party, ideology or constituency.