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was even a real liberal.
    One of the most thoughtful efforts to understand Obama’s worldview and intellectual underpinnings as a new president was a work published in 2011 by Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg entitled
Reading Obama: Dreams,Hope, and the American Political Tradition
. Kloppenberg argued that Obama was difficult to decipher because people were trying to understand him through conventional lenses. “His approach to politics seems new only to those who lack his acquaintance with the venerable traditions of American democracy: respect for one’s opponents and a willingness to compromise with them,” he wrote. “His commitment to conciliation derives from his understanding that in a democracy all victories are incomplete. In his words, ‘no law is ever final, no battle truly finished,’ because any defeat can be redeemed and any triumph lost in the next vote. Building lasting support for policies and substantive changes is not the work of months or even years but decades.” Kloppenberg went on to write that Obama was steeped in the history of America but that he did not draw on the same things many Democrats had drawn on in the past. Obama’s thought process was a reflection of what Kloppenberg called “profound changes in American intellectual life” after Obama was born. “Obama’s ideas and his approach to American politics have thrown political observers off balance,” he wrote. “His books, his speeches and his political record make clear that he represents a hybrid of old and new, which explains why he puzzles so many contemporaries—supporters and critics alike—who see him through conventional and thus distorting lenses.” Kloppenberg’s analysis is based, as the title suggests, mostly on a careful reading of Obama’s writings and on some of the known history of him before he became president. As such, it was insightful but incomplete. Like many other people who watched Obama’s rise to the presidency, Kloppenberg was struck by the new leader’s seeming commitment to negotiation, conciliation, and compromise. He wrote, “Obama’s commitments to philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy—to building support slowly, gradually, through compromise and painstaking consensus building—represent a calculated risk as political strategy. It is a gamble he may lose. But it is not a sign of weakness, as his critics on the right and left allege. It shows instead that he understands not only the contingency of cultural values but also how the nation’s political system was designed to work. Democracy means struggling with differences, then achieving provisional agreements that immediately spark new disagreements. . . . His predilection to conciliate whenever possible is grounded in his understanding of the history of American thought, culture and politics.”
    In December 2008, I interviewed President-elect Obama at his transition headquarters in Chicago. I noted that he had announced his candidacy on the grounds of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln had given his famous “House Divided” speech, and would be following some of the same route Lincoln took as he made his way to Washington for his first inaugural. How did Lincoln inform his view of the presidency? Iasked. Lincoln, he said, was his favorite president, though he did not want people to believe he was drawing an equivalency between himself and the sixteenth president. Then he offered a revealing window into his own thinking about leadership and power. “What I admire so deeply about Lincoln,” he said, “number one, I think he’s the quintessential American because he’s self-made. The way Alexander Hamilton was self-made or so many of our great iconic Americans are, that sense that you don’t accept limits, that you can shape your own destiny. That obviously has appeal to me given where I came from. That American spirit is one of the things that is most fundamental to me