Caveat: President X

I have seen so little discussion of Obama's character that I find genuinely plausible, at a core level.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogging for The Atlantic, recently, finally managed to strike a chord for me. He writes:

"My sense, in reading about Obama before he was a national politician or even a politician at all, is that this kind of cultural conservatism is genuine and not a ploy. There's a section in The Bridge where, having graduated from Columbia, Obama becomes a kind of ascetic and basically tries to remove himself from all the worldly things that tend to tempt men. It reminded very much of the kind of thing you see black men go through in prison, the most obvious being Malcolm X. Indeed, I've always thought there was something of Malcolm in Obama–the mix of humor and sternness, the notion of re-invention, the cultural conservatism."

The implication is that far from being the kind of left-wing liberal that the Right caricatures him to be, Obama is a kind of "radical centrist," which, in the long run, they should be much more worried about – because he's the embodiment of what happens when "by any means necessary" meets head-to-head, and then merges, with pragmatism, ambition and perhaps, even, compassion. Indeed, maybe Obama's a sort of "compassionate conservative."

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