Dionne: It's Not Easy Being Obama

Columnist E.J. Dionne offers one of the more reasonable assessments of President Obama in the Washington Post.

This is not simply or even primarily a matter of color, although the president's racial background has been a source of both opportunity and trial. As the first African-American in the White House, he has won an unprecedented level of support in the black community and the good will of enough white Americans to build a national majority. Yet it's undeniable that racism lurks beneath so many of the preposterously false charges against him -- that this son of Hawaii wasn't really born in the United States, that he is a secret Muslim who "hates America," that he's animated by a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.

In fact, Obama is a tempered sort of progressive who repeatedly annoys his party's left with an incessant pursuit of Republican support for "grand bargains" -- one reason why his health care plan is so state-oriented and gives Republican governors and legislatures so much opportunity to undermine it... He's an anti-ideological leader in an ideological age, a middle-of-the-road liberal skeptical of the demands placed on a movement leader, a politician often disdainful of the tasks that politics asks him to perform. He wants to invite the nation to reason together with him when nearly half the country thinks his premises and theirs are utterly at odds. Doing so is unlikely to get any easier. But being Barack Obama, he'll keep trying.