NYT: "Obama After Bush: Leading by Second Thought"

[steven johnson]

Obama's balking at releasing the photographs of prisoners, retaining the military commission system and his abstaining from reversing 'don't ask don't tell' -- demonstrated Obama's complicated side his books and history hinted at. He is still the pragmatic community organizer bringing people with divergent ideas together. Never too idealistic, never too mercenary, never too dogmatic.

In authorizing continued covert action in Pakistan and agreeing to a slower pace of withdrawal from Iraq than he talked about during the campaign, he has raised the question of whether new facts, more hawkish advisers or the drumbeat of daily threat assessments have subtly changed his willingness to throw the gearboxes in reverse. On both the left and the right, there is speculation about whether the influence of Mr. Gates, or of his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, or of Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, had forced him to revise his view.

But the bottom line is that Mr. Obama's course corrections have real-life consequences. Mr. Bush kept saying that he wanted to close Guantánamo Bay but could not find an effective replacement for it. So he never acted. Mr. Obama began with that action, and now discovers it is more difficult to accomplish than it seemed a few months ago.

"These issues are always more difficult in practice than they are in the environment of a campaign," Samuel R. Berger, who served as President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, said Friday.

The reality is that the second 100 days of this presidency are bound to be filled with course corrections. Announcing departures from the Bush-era practices was, as one of Mr. Obama's national security aides put it recently, "grabbing the low-hanging fruit." Writing the rules for the next four years, or eight, requires lawyers, compromises and, inevitably, disappointments for those who discover that cleanly breaking with the past always sounds more appealing than living with the consequences.



Obama After Bush: Leading by Second Thought