PETER BAKER had an interesting piece in yesterday's New York Times, "Obama, Searching for a Vision", about the president's penchant for uninspiring pragmatism in the face of a tea-party infused Republican ideology about shrinking the size and role of government in a country mired in national debt. Progressives, meanwhile, worry Mr Obama is losing his liberal bottle. Forget the health-care and financial-reform battles, they see Mr Obama caving on Guantanamo and cowing to Speaker Boehner's budget demands.

In his piece, Mr Baker quotes Yuval Levin, a former aide to George Bush, who says that Mr Obama, “needs to be very careful to avoid leaving voters with the impression that his sphinx-like aloofness is all that liberalism has to offer." He also paraphrases William Galston, a former aide to Bill Clinton, who says the president is taking "a 'winning the future' approach rather than dwelling on the problems of the moment."

So is Mr Obama giving up on a progressive liberal vision of the future for realist pragmatism, or is he being pragmatic by staying above today's partisan squabbling and focusing on the long-term liberal vision? True, the Obama of spring 2011 seems quite different from the Obama who delivered this state-of-the-union address in 2010, in which he claimed that “we must answer history's call” and asked “how long should America put its future on hold?” It's difficult to sound visionary when pushed to compromise on taxes or painful budget cuts. But what Mr Baker's article seems to suggest, as the above quotes attest, is that pragmatism and liberal ideology are an incompatible couple.

I think this is debatable, and unfair to Mr Obama. It is first important to realise that ideology is not a pejorative word—it does not need to be attached to fundamentalism, propaganda or totalitarian utopias. An ideology can be seen as simply a set of political ideas organised under an overarching and forward-looking understanding of where we are and where we want to go. Pragmatic governing, being mature and doing deals, is not anathema to a liberal vision, for example; it just means realising it in a measured way.

In this way, Mr Obama is working in part from the playbook of post-second world war liberals like Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian and political realist, whom the president claimed as one of his favourite philosophers, and Louis Hartz, a historian of American liberalism. Both warned Americans about naive political errands, either abroad via an overly-interventionist foreign policy, for example, or at home through policies on the radical left. To a large extent Mr Obama has tried to avoid such errands himself, by placing strict limits on the intervention in Libya and surge in Afghanistan, and by ignoring his more liberal supporters who would've preferred him to drive tougher (perhaps impossible) bargains on health care, taxes and the budget.

But a liberal pragmatist like Mr Obama need not give up on ideological goals entirely. As Max Weber put it in "Politics as a Vocation", in governing, there is a difference between an "ethic of responsibility", resisting aggression, and an "ethic of ultimate ends", which uses power, especially violence, to attain a political goal. For Weber, the former is the preferable route. It might not always be clear, but perhaps Mr Obama's political vision is showing that it is possible to govern responsibly without giving up on that thing called hope. Progressives should give him credit for this.

(Photo credit: AFP)