Barack Obama is a polished pragmatist and a brilliant orator. But is he also a committed progressive, a true reformer?

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Alec Bruce

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It's been a scant five months, and already the sharks are circling the administration of Barack Hussein Obama. And yet, the most recent attacks are not coming from the usual suspects on the right; but from those on left who somehow had hoped that America's first black president would, despite all evidence to the contrary, carry the campaign banner of progressive change into the White House, and beyond.

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On everything from gay marriage to the financial crisis, from health care to government accountability, a growing chorus of fellow travellers are expressing doubt, disappointment and even despair over Obama's rookie performance.

In a recent interview with MSNBC, Anne Weismann, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, declared: "The Obama administration is following the same anti-transparency policy as the Bush administration. Refusing to let the public know who visits the White House is not the action of a pro-transparency, pro-accountability administration."

In a televised face-to-face with CNN's Wolf Blitzer last Tuesday, professional comedian and malcontent Bill Maher, who hosts his own weekly commentary show on HBO, had this to say: "I don't know if this administration has really caught up to the idea that Americans are a lot more liberal, perhaps, than we think they are. Part of the problem is that we don't really have a progressive party in this country. We have the Democrats, who are what the Republicans used to be when I was a kid. They're a pro-business, corporate-friendly party. And then we have the Republicans, which are just a club for angry white people and Jesus freaks."

But Kevin Baker's cover story in the July edition of Harper's Magazine "" a bastion of left-leaning political thought "" delivers the most stinging indictment, if only for its agility and scholarship: "Just as Herbert Hoover could not, in the end, break away from the best economic advice of the 1920s," he writes, "Barack Obama is sticking with the 'key men' of the 1990s. The predictable result is that, even as he claims to recognize the interlocking nature of the problems facing us, the president is in fact abandoning most of his program, at least for the time being."

All of which suggests that Obama is becoming, perhaps, the most unknowable president since John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Is he a true reformer, or merely a brilliant orator? Is he a committed progressive, or simply a polished pragmatist? We know he talks the talk surpassingly well. (As Bill Maher joked the other night, "He's Jimi Hendrix and that teleprompter is his guitar"). But can he, will he, walk the walk?

On the other hand, what were any of us, anywhere in the world, realistically expecting, given the wretched state of the American economy and the profoundly polarized condition of that nation's political environment?

According to all best estimates, a few years from now the United States will face a debt of close to $13 trillion. And that's not principally because Obama bailed out the big banks and the auto companies (though these moves haven't helped). It's because eight years of Republican rule produced two of the costliest wars since the Big One in the early 1940s. And it's because the Bush-Cheney credo regarding free-wheeling, unregulated financial markets was "let them roll".

If Obama had let the banks fail, and the car makers collapse, what, I wonder, would the world think of him today? How much closer would he be to executing the radical change his once-ardent supporters expect? Indeed, would his job performance be any more admirable had he nailed hundreds-of-thousands of middle and working class men and women to the cross of radical change?

As distasteful as it is to purists and ideologues (myself included on most days), change doesn't happen without power. Getting it is the first stage. Keeping it is the second. Wielding it is the third. Obama is somewhere in the first quarter of his second stage in public life. And five months is too short a period to judge what is yet unknowable.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer. He may be reached via www.thebrucereport.com.