Pragmatist-In-Chief, Ctd.

By Patrick Appel
Ross's thoughts:

Obama will probably often end up defining himself against progressivism, rhetorically, even when he's embracing progressive ideas. (See his campaign's extremely effective health-care ads for an example of how this works in practice.) The President-elect's ability to hold his coalition together, then, may depend in no small part on whether the Democratic Party's left wing feels that it's getting enough out of his Presidency in practice to justify playing the bad guy in the narrative Obama will be selling to the country as a whole, in which post-partisan "whatever works" pragmatism triumphs over ideologues of the left and right alike.