After he declared his candidacy, in early 2007, the Obama who dominated his first year of campaigning was the post-partisan one. He won legions of followers through the sheer power of inspiration. At Dartmouth College in early January, on the night before the New Hampshire primary, a group of students expressed to me deep disenchantment with the Bush and the Clinton dynasties—the boomer War of the Roses. “Obama is the anti-Bush who could get us beyond Bush and all the polarization in Washington,” one student said. Another put it this way: “He’s one of us.” The post-partisan Obama brought millions of young voters into his movement, and he began to peel away moderate Republicans who were sick of their party’s being defined by Dick Cheney’s autocratic style of governance and Karl Rove’s cynical political tactics.

The real problem with partisanship, Obama believes, is that it’s no longer pragmatic. After decades of bruising fights in Washington, it has become incompatible with effective government. “I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in,” he writes in “Hope.” “I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country.” Partisan politics, defined merely as demagoguery or stupidity, is easy to reject—but doing so doesn’t take us very far. It’s like calling on everyone to be decent. At its weakest, post-partisanship amounts to an aversion to fighting, a trait that some people who know Obama see in him. In the early months of the primary, Obama seemed almost physically to shrink from confrontation, and Hillary Clinton got the better of him in debate after debate.

Just before the Iowa caucus, Sidney Blumenthal, a friend and an adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, told me, “It’s not a question of transcending partisanship. It’s a question of fulfilling it. If we can win and govern well while handling multiple crises at the same time and the Congress, then we can move the country out of this Republican era and into a progressive Democratic era, for a long period of time.” Blumenthal found Obama’s approach to be “ahistorical”—a simple hope that the past could be waved away. Should Obama win the nomination, members of the Clinton campaign cautioned, he would have no idea what was in store for him. At a Clinton event in Hampton, New Hampshire, a seventy-one-year-old woman named Ruth Keene told me that “the Republicans would chew Obama up.”

They tried like hell. They called him an élitist, a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, an Arab, an appeaser, a danger to the republic, a threat to small children, a friend of terrorists, an enemy of Israel, a vote thief, a non-citizen, an anti-American, and a celebrity. Obama didn’t defeat the Republicans simply by rising above partisanship, although his dignified manner served as a continual rebuke to his enemies and went a long way toward reassuring skeptical voters who weren’t members of the cult of “Yes We Can.” It turned out that the culture war, in spite of Sarah Palin’s manic gunplay, was largely over. Obama won because he had a vastly superior organization, a steely resilience that became more evident in October than it was in January (for which he owes a debt to Hillary Clinton), and a willingness to fight back on ground on which the majority of Americans—looking to government for solutions—now stand.

According to David Axelrod, among the books that Obama has read recently is “Unequal Democracy,” by the Princeton political scientist Larry M. Bartels. It attributes the steep economic inequality of our time not to blind technological and market forces but to specific Republican policies. Bartels writes, “On average, the real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans.” For decades, rising inequality coincided with conservative electoral success, because voters were largely ignorant of the effects of tax-code changes and other economic policies, those in power were unresponsive to the concerns of working-class citizens, and broader income growth occurred in election years. In other words, the causes of inequality are essentially political—an insight that suggests that Obama might use economic policy to begin reversing a decades-long trend.

“Unequal Democracy” is decidedly a title from the left-wing book club, and it suits a candidate whose language became more ideological in the days after the markets crashed, in mid-September. Obama began to refer to the financial meltdown as “the final verdict” on a “failed economic philosophy”—words that one of his advisers called “the key line in the campaign narrative.” Another adviser told me that, in the final months of the race, economic conditions pushed Obama to the left. “Barack is a progressive person but also cautious,” the adviser wrote in an e-mail. “He understands politics and understands the limits it can create on progressive policy. But as the times have moved, he’s moved quickly along with them.” Early on, during the more vaporous and messianic phase of his candidacy, Obama took more cautious stands than Hillary Clinton did, but this fall he began to embrace some of Clinton’s positions that he had once refused to support, such as a moratorium on foreclosures and a government buyout of mortgages.

Obama was able to make a powerful case for a break with conservative economics, in part, because he doesn’t carry the scars of recent history. “He’s not intimidated by the issue frames that have bedevilled Democrats for the last couple of decades,” one of the advisers said. “There’s never been a sense of having to triangulate.” By the end of the campaign, Obama wasn’t just running against broken politics, or even against the Bush Presidency. He had the anti-government philosophy of the entire Age of Reagan in his sights.

So events in the homestretch crystallized Obama’s economic liberalism. But anyone who has read “The Audacity of Hope” already knew that Obama is no moderate when it comes to the purpose of government. On social and legal issues—guns, abortion, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, the courts and the Constitution—Obama’s instinct is usually to soften the left-right clash by reconciling opposites or by escaping them altogether, to find what he called, discussing abortion in his final debate with McCain, “common ground.” The phrase is a perfect expression of what Sunstein says is Obama’s determination to accommodate disagreement to the extent possible. On issues of culture and law, Obama’s liberalism is more procedural than substantive: his most fervent belief is in rules and in standards of serious debate. Given the abuses of executive power and political discourse under George W. Bush, this trait will bring no insignificant cleansing. But Obama’s personal caution and conservatism, his sense of rectitude, as well as his idea of politics as a mature calling, shouldn’t be mistaken for split-the-difference centrism on every issue. On questions of social welfare—jobs, income, health care, energy—which don’t immediately provoke a battle over irreconcilable values, he has given every indication of favoring activist government. When I asked Axelrod if the conservative era had just ended, he said, “From the standpoint of values, I wouldn’t say that. But, from the standpoint of economics, yes—American history runs in epochs like this.” He added, “That’s what the theory of our race was—that this is one of those periods of change we encounter every once in a while in our history.”

A chapter in “The Audacity of Hope” titled “Opportunity” describes why “the social compact F.D.R. helped construct is beginning to crumble,” and begins to sketch a new social compact for a new century. Obama makes a point of incorporating some of the insights of the Reagan era—such as the importance of market incentives and efficiency—but his conclusion, which is unmistakably Rooseveltian, is a call for the renewal of “widespread economic security.” Similarly, in a speech on the economy at New York’s Cooper Union, last March, Obama said, “I do not believe that government should stand in the way of innovation or turn back the clock to an older era of regulation. But I do believe that government has a role to play in advancing our common prosperity, by providing stable macroeconomic and financial conditions for sustained growth, by demanding transparency, and by insuring fair competition in the marketplace. Our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between an oppressive government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism.” Since then, Obama has made it even more clear that he wants to lay the ghost of Reagan to rest.

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In September, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, in Boston, held a forum on Presidential leadership. Cass Sunstein was one of the participants; another was Robert Kuttner, the co-founder of The American Prospect and a liberal economics journalist. The two argued over what it would take for Obama to be a great President. In Kuttner’s view, nothing short of a return to New Deal-style government intervention will be enough to prevent the dire economy from dooming Obama’s Presidency. This summer, Kuttner published a short book titled “Obama’s Challenge,” which he described to me as “an open letter” to the candidate. “Obama will need to be a more radical president than he was a presidential candidate,” Kuttner writes. “Obama, in his books and speeches, has been almost obsessed with the idea that people are sick of partisan bickering. Yet he also has claimed the identity of a resolute progressive. Can he be both? History suggests that it is possible both to govern as a radical reformer and to be a unifier, and thereby move the political center to the left.” According to Kuttner, the next President must be willing to spend at least six hundred billion dollars—a Keynesian outpouring—on public works, health care, energy independence, unemployment benefits, mortgage refinancing, aid to state and local governments, and other programs. Otherwise, the country will slide into a depression that will rival the one Roosevelt inherited. (When I ran the six-hundred-billion figure by Paul Krugman, he agreed.)

“Sunstein’s minimalism is exactly what’s not called for,” Kuttner told me, and he later added, “We’re on the verge of Great Depression Two. All bets are off. The people who talk about post-liberal, post-ideological, they have been completely overtaken by events. It’s the same abuses, the same scenario, that led to the crash of ’29. It’s the same dynamics of the financial economy dragging down the real economy—these are enduring lessons. Everybody who was talking about being in a kind of post-liberal world, they’re the ones who don’t have much purchase on what’s going on. The question is whether Obama will come to this.” The answer will depend in part on the advisers he chooses. In Kuttner’s mind, the deficit hawks and deregulators of the Clinton Administration—Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers—have been discredited by the financial crisis, and he thinks that it would be a big mistake for Obama to give them powerful roles in his Administration. (Summers is considered a likely candidate for Treasury Secretary, and his top economic advisers are connected with the Hamilton Project, a center-left affiliate of the Brookings Institution.) But, beyond macroeconomics, Kuttner, who plans to hold a conference in Washington called “Thinking Big,” shortly before Obama’s Inauguration, thinks that the Democrats have a clear political agenda: “the reclamation of an ideology.”

This is not an ambition that Obama has ever publicly embraced. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he specifically rejects such talk. “That’s not Obama,” Robert B. Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s first Labor Secretary and now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, said. “Obama is not about the restoration of government as a progressive force per se.” He added, “Were Obama to approach this in an ideological way, talking about this as ‘We are now going to affirm the importance and centrality of government in the future of the nation,’ I think the public would walk away.”

Reich, who holds Obama in high regard—he supported his candidacy over that of his old friend Hillary Clinton—bears his share of scars from the Clinton years, many of them inflicted by other members of the Administration. He fought and lost a number of first-term battles against Rubin and other centrists, who persuaded Clinton to balance the budget rather than spend more on public investments. Obama will take office with a number of advantages that were unavailable to the last Democratic President. The Party is more united, the Democrats in Congress energized by their recent return to a majority. As stagnant wages and pressing public needs have become the focus of Democratic domestic policy, the old line between deficit hawks and economic liberals has dissolved— last week, the Times published an Op-Ed piece co-written by a leading representative of each group: Rubin and the economist Jared Bernstein, respectively. (They met somewhere around the forty-yard line on Bernstein’s half of the field.) Bill Clinton began his Presidency as the country was coming out of a recession, and Alan Greenspan, the semi-divine chairman of the Federal Reserve, could hold the new President hostage to Wall Street. Now Greenspan, in retirement, has confessed to Congress that his free-market world view was flawed; Wall Street lies prostrate after suffering something like a paralyzing stroke; and, with the country entering a deep recession, both deficit spending and financial regulation are givens. More profoundly, the conservative tide was still high when Clinton entered the White House, and it quickly swamped him. Obama will take power at its lowest ebb. It is for all these reasons that 2009 will be more like 1933 than like 1993.

Nonetheless, in our conversation Reich kept returning to the many ways in which President Obama’s ability to act quickly will be compromised. “We are not in Hundred Days territory,” Reich said. “We may be, if the economy goes into free fall—the public may demand dramatic action. But there are so many constraints on dramatic action.” New Presidents make mistakes—in Clinton’s case, Reich said, they included the push to integrate gays into the military, the botched effort to reform health care, and a failure to establish priorities. Even with a solid majority in Congress, Obama will have to deal with the Blue Dog Democrats, who represent states and districts that are more conservative. Reich recently met with one Blue Dog, in the Southwest, who “felt that it was going to be very difficult politically to make the case” that increasing the deficit during a recession was the right thing to do. On the other hand, unions will likely pressure the Administration to curtail trade agreements, in the interest of preventing the further loss of industrial jobs to other countries.