The new president: How will he govern?

Barack Obama is about to embark on the biggest balancing act of his life, said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. Our 44th commander in chief has effectively asked the nation to accept “leadership based on contradictory principles.” Though his background and voting record are distinctly liberal, Obama won the White House by hewing to the center and vowing to usher in a new, post-partisan politics. He’s promised tax cuts and fiscal discipline, an aggressive new energy policy, and improved health care for all Americans. Making good on these ambitious promises as the country heads into a deep recession will be a delicate job—maybe even impossible. If he’s “too much the ambitious liberal,” he may alienate potential allies and rouse conservatives into active opposition. If he’s “too much the cautious mediator,” he risks losing the momentum for “change” that made him president. “Which Barack Obama will dominate as he begins to govern?”

Let’s hope it’s the cautious mediator, said William Galston in The New Republic. Obama has to make good on specific campaign promises, such as the middle-class tax cut, but “he would do well to resist” the temptation to do too much, too fast on the war in Iraq, health care, and energy. The more ambitious a presidential agenda, history has shown, the more resistance it generates, and the more likely it is to fail. Though America rejected John McCain, said Democratic strategist Douglas Schoen in The Wall Street Journal, it did not embrace a liberal agenda. The independents who so heavily supported Obama in this election were won over by his talk of “bipartisanship” and pragmatic problem-solving. “They are actually seeking a middle route: consensus, conciliation, and a results-oriented approach to governance.” That means taking Republicans into account, and naming some to his Cabinet.

Why should he? said John Nichols in The Nation. “Obama did not merely win the presidency”; he’s ushered in “a governing majority” of the sort that Democrats haven’t enjoyed in decades. When critics say that Obama mustn’t overreach, said Joe Conason in The New York Observer, that doesn’t mean Obama must “trash his ideals.” After years of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tom DeLay, “people are in the mood for something different.” With his many political gifts, Obama will govern from the center, but he “will mark the center in a new place.”

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In other words, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News, “America is about to take a leftward lurch.” Our new president will surely get behind “a ton of liberal initiatives,” including higher taxes for the so-called rich and billions in new spending. On foreign policy, he’ll abandon “American exceptionalism” and seek a feel-good but dangerous international consensus. As a Republican, said Jonah Goldberg in the New York Post, I’m rather looking forward to that. If Obama follows the Democratic Congress’ lead and governs from the extreme Left, “the Democrats will walk en masse into the rear rotor blade of a helicopter called the 2010 elections.”

Obama and his advisors “seem exquisitely aware of this trap,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. Instead, they’ll start off by grabbing “the low-hanging fruit”: approving the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that Bush vetoed, reversing Bush’s ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, and enacting a law mandating equal pay for women. Liberal bloggers and a Democratic Congress, undoubtedly, will clamor for much more. “Obama’s ability to resist, and to dispense available goodies in an orderly fashion, will be key to the success of his presidency.”