My working model of the distinction between the Clinton and Obama campaigns during the primary was that the Clinton campaign was somewhat more boldly progressive on domestic issues, notably health care, and quite a bit more conservative on foreign policy. At the end of the day, this seemed to cut in Obama's favor, as the executive has fairly little autonomy on issues like health reform (Congress decides it), but quite a bit on foreign affairs. Since winning the election, however, Obama's choices have demonstrated rather the opposite. On domestic issues, and health care in particular, Obama's appointments have been individuals understood as passionate and unyielding advocates of comprehensive, and universal, health reform. This is true for Tom Daschle, the new health czar, and true for Peter Orszag, the new director of the OMB, and it's even true for Larry Summers, who'll be a senior adviser in the White House. Conversely, Obama's foreign policy picks have been aggressively centrist. Obama ran against Clinton's conventional foreign policy instincts in the primary, but is ready to elevate her to secretary of state. And all reporting suggests that Robert Gates may well remain as secretary of defense. Both may be good choices, but they're a sharp break with the campaign's primary posturing. All of which goes to underscore how bad campaign-season information is. The data all comes from candidate statements, campaign decisions, and messaging choices, but it's impossible to disentangle which are motivated by principle and which by politics. It now looks likely that Obama's relative caution on health care was a simple function of coming out with a subpar plan that they thought would be to the left of Hillary (the working assumption was that her proposal would be very timid), but was not, and thus had to be defended from the right. That strategy, however, no longer looks operative, and the health care appointments haven't hewed to that approach. Meanwhile, it's a bit hard to say what was going on in foreign policy, but when Obama spoke of "end[ing] the mind-set that got us into war in the first place," most folks I know took that as central principle, but it's a bit hard to sync with the retention of the last secretary of defense and the appointment of Hillary Clinton. Which is, again, not to say that any of these appointments are bad ones, or good ones. The jury is still out on administration priorities and individual efficacy. Health care could still languish, and foreign policy could prove a progressive redoubt. But they're not the appointments you would have predicted if you'd been following the campaign.
