Obama snares the right

It seems that Barack Obama has them -- the rightward centrists, the baptized conservatives and the untethered but still emphatic neocons -- just where he wants them.

By and large they're positively gushing over his recent passel of appointments, which is just the sort of unity of blessing the president-elect was looking for. Lord knows that after eight years of Bushian polarization and alienation, he needs all the support he can get to turn things around.

The best survey of gush I've yet read comes from the National Review's syndicated columnist, Mona Charen. In "Pinch Me, Am I Dreaming?" she produces her research on conservative opinion of Obama's appointments, and lo and behold she finds the appointees are "enough to keep some of us smiling at a time when we were expecting to be in deep anguish."

Ms. Charen et al.'s expectation of "anguish" must have come from their having bought into the McCain-Palin-RNC hype of Obama's socialistic and appeasing ways, which, if true, is a rather stunning, if unstated, admission of either political naivete or inattention to biography.

But wherever the right-wing angst came from then, Charen now writes that "Obama's appointments thus far" are "shockingly welcome." And her approval, she further observes, is no minority opinion within the hunkered- and bunkered-down minority camp.

For instance jingoistic commentator Max Boot says, in his own inimitable way, that he is "gobsmacked." Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell thinks Obama is "off to a good start." And, somewhat less surprising, given his episodic gushing throughout the campaign, the NYT's co-resident conservative David Brooks is "tremendously impressed."

So which appointments produced such an orgiastic reaction from the right? More or less all of them.

With respect to the economy that modern conservatism tried its best to destroy, Charen asserts that "if you want a centrist," then Lawrence Summers "is your man." His chief recommendation for the right, however, seems to be that he was once trashed and humiliated by Ivy League political correctness -- then promptly defended and consecrated by Harvard's saintly conservative social historian, Stephan Thernstrom. (Memo to the frantically unhinged David Horowitz: They're not all left wingers).

And since Timothy Geithner "is a Summers protégé," he of course receives the right's automatic endorsement -- a kind of political correctness by association -- and as for Christina Romer, well, she once "penned an article making the [astonishingly unsurprising] case that tax cuts can increase economic activity." Needless to say, Mona heard God's upper-class angels singing on that one. Application approved.

Moving on to foreign policy, Ms. Charen & Co. then senses a center-shift "to the right" -- mainly in the personage of Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, whose conservative reception has "ranged from cautious optimism to outright enthusiasm."

The National Review's Michael Ledeen says Jones is "almost unbearably delightful," and, since the manly Ledeen is "no coddler of wimps," bubbles Charen, that closes that book.

The only itsy-bitsy possible exception to Charen's enthusiasm is Hillary Clinton, who, writes Charen -- I guess disapprovingly? -- "is no Jeane Kirkpatrick" (although that surely comes as a great relief to Bill).

She is, you know, OK, says Charen, which is about as much enthusiasm as I myself can work up. But Charen prefaced her emotional resignation to Mrs. Clinton's appointment with the unforgiving condemnations that Hillary "did everything but … apologize for her vote in favor of the Iraq war," that she "opposed the surge of troops in Iraq but then -- this is chutzpah! -- attempted to take credit for its success," and that she "criticized what she calls the Bush administration's 'obsessive' focus on 'expensive and unproven missile defense technology.'"

So it's a mixed bag, with Hillary having characteristically placed herself firmly in both camps on assorted foreign policy issues. But doggone it she's a leftie at heart and Mona just knows it. "On the other hand," she says, Hillary Clinton "is not Carl Levin or Dennis Kucinich or Anthony Lake or Samantha Power."

What Mona misses, however, is that it's Obama who will be in control as the Decider Guy -- and whether it's Gen. Jones or Rep. Kucinich advising him on national security, or Timothy Geithner or Ward Churchill advising him on economics, the ultimate decision will rest on Obama's reliably pragmatic intellect, and not some prefabricated construct that so often comes from the settled territory of professional advice.

Ms. Charen gloats that "if I were a left-winger, I'd be tearing out my hair about now" -- a comment oblivious to Obama's nonideological Venus Flytrap in action, in which she, among other right wingers, is the seduced fly.

Obama gives not one whit about her left-right scorecard, although some of his appointments unmistakably provide him modest political cover for wholly pragmatic decisions which, in time, are bound to unsettle the ideological right and spoil Mona's day.