Obama the Transformer

This president is breaking the mold—revolutionizing policies and perspectives in Washington and around the world.

The pace of change under this president—frequently two or three headline events in a single news cycle—generally crowds out the chance to step back and reflect on the singular nature of Obama's leadership. Yet just look at the past week: Cairo, Germany, then the D-Day commemoration—all banner stories—followed by the front page news that Obama has now decided to take a central role in designing health-care reform instead of leaving the process largely in congressional hands.

The Republican pratfalls make news, too, but not the kind that helps them. (Thus, on Sunday Newt Gingrich reached a synthesis—and what about Newt is not synthetic?—of his one-man dialectic on Judge Sonia Sotomayor. First Newt said she was a "racist," then not. That clash of opposites appears to have yielded Newt's latest smear: that the judge is a "racialist.")

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Robert Shrum has been a senior adviser to the Gore 2000 presidential campaign, the campaign of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and the British Labour Party. In addition to being the chief strategist for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, Shrum has advised thirty winning U.S. Senate campaigns; eight winning campaigns for governor; mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities; and the Democratic Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Shrum's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications. The author of No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner (Simon and Schuster), he is currently a Senior Fellow at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.