I don't know if any of you have read the Rick Pearlstein article in Rolling Stone, but I think it makes a lot of sense, and speaks to my concerns about what lies ahead - both in the coming campaign and, should Obama win, the four years that follow.

Here are a few salient paragraphs:

Barack Obama knew it too. [that after years of Republicans in control of all three branches of government, America overwhelmingly was ready for liberal solutions] He just wouldn't say it. He refused to criticize right-wing ideology. Or to make a full-throated case that Democrats offered an ideological alternative.

Instead, his favorite campaign line on the Republican record was a story about competence: The Republicans "drove the country into the ditch," and "now they want the keys back." But Republicans aren't bad drivers; they drive exactly where they want to go, pedal to the metal. Sure, they sometimes compromise on tactics - certainly Reagan did. But he, and they, never waver on strategic aims. They plant their flag in an uncompromising position, and wait for the world to come around - which, quite often, it eventually does. This is because in a media environment based on the ideology of "balance," in which anything one of the parties insists upon must be given equal weight to whatever the other party says back, the party that plants its ideological flag further from the center makes the center move. And that is how America changes. You set the stage for future changes by shifting the rhetoric of the present.

[snip] ...Obama never attempts that [to define reality]. Instead, he ratifies his opponent's reality, by folding it into his original negotiating position. And since the opponent's preferred position is always further out than his own, even a "successful" compromise ends up with the reality looking more like the one the Republicans prefer. A compromise serves to legitimize.

[snip]

Right-wing change relies on leadership like that - Democrats who don't plant a flag, who refuse to render the bad guys "controversial,' and who never stake their claim on apparently "insane" ideas of their own - like proposals to pass a federal law desegregating public accommodations.
And resolute sanity? It can help manage a country just fine. It just cannot change it much. For that, Obama can't just try to play chess. He has to tell us the direction he wants the country to go.