TW: Obama has not yet accomplished anything as POTUS and the media honeymoon he is enjoying will end soon enough. Yet, his transitional actions are at least causing some dissonance within the right-wing. Some of it is as Klein points out due to the Right's own myopia but some is because Obama gives every sign of being a progressive pragmatist, which for fans like myself gives me much hope. Folks tend to think of politicians in black and white political terms of left or right, but they never are.
Regarding national security if Obama can re-establish a broad consensus amidst centrist Dems and Repubs then he will have restored the basis for better American foreign policy going forward.
From Klein at Time:
"You have to laugh about the denizens of the political right who are shocked at Barack Obama's moderation: who were they expecting for Secretary of Defense, Louis Farrakhan? Jeremiah Wright at State? Much of this is a result of the right drinking its own koolaid: the mythology of Obama being some sort of crypto-lefty, "associated" with people like William Ayres and Wright, rather than the moderate realist who sent signals throughout the campaign that he was looking to people like Gates and Jones to join his team...
What...the neocons will have to come to terms with now is that they were wrong and they have lost. There is a new national security alliance between multilateralist Democrats and realist Republicans--an alliance that precludes the witless bellicosity of the neoconservative right and the small strain of pacifist idealists on the left. The policy of the new administration will favor diplomacy over the use of force. That is not to say that Obama will never use force--but when he does, the chances are he'll likely known the difference between the local Shi'ites and Sunnis, Tajiks and Pashtuns. And so will his team."
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/11/26/gobsmacked/
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