Obama sees Bush policy for the most part as incompetent and poorly executed, not wrong. Obama plans to do everything that Bush couldn't do: catch Bin Laden, draw down the "wrong" war in Iraq, and concentrate on the "right" war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Same quagmire, different location.
Which brings us to the grim realization that -- surprise! Obama's a Clintonian interventionist centrist.
Mr Obama has moved quickly in the last 48 hours to get his cabinet team in place, unveiling a raft of heavyweight appointments, in addition to Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.There's a pretty large difference between "better than McCain" and "change we can believe in." Hillary, the word has it, is already cleaning house of the folks who actually thought Obama was going to keep his word to progressives on the war.But his preference for General James Jones, a former Nato commander who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department has dismayed many of his earliest supporters.
The likelihood that Mr Obama will retain George W Bush's Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has reinforced the notion that he will not aggressively pursue the radical withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq over the next 16 months and engagement with rogue states that he has pledged.
Chris Bowers of the influential OpenLeft.com blog complained: "That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama's major appointments so far."
Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos site, the in-house talking shop for the anti-war Left, warned that Democrats risk sounding "tone deaf" to the views of "the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies."
A spokesman for the President-elect was forced to confirm that Mr Obama holds to his previous views. "His position on Iraq has not changed and will not change."
But the growing disillusionment underlines the fine line Mr Obama must walk between appearing to reach out to former opponents and keeping his grassroot supporters happy.
Mr Obama seems conscious of the need to move fast, to reassure a watching world that he will be ready to hit the ground running on foreign and economic policy.
He will wait until Friday before formally announcing his national security team, but he will on Monday formally unveil his economic team, with New York Federal Reserve bank chairman Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary and the New Mexico Governor, Bill Richardson, in the Commerce portfolio.
Before Hillary Clinton has been formally offered the job as Secretary of State, a purge of Barack Obama's top foreign policy team has begun.Underneath the catty sniping is the truth: Obama's foreign policy won't differ from Bush or Clinton. Hillary must have realized that her best shot at the White House isn't around Obama...but through him.The advisers who helped trash the former First Lady's foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail are being brutally shunted aside, as the price of her accepting the job of being the public face of America to the world. In negotiations with Mr Obama this week before agreeing to take the job, she demanded and received assurances that she alone should appoint staff to the State Department. She also got assurances that she will have direct access to the President and will not have to go through his foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council, which is where many of her critics in the Obama team are expected to end up.
The first victims of Mrs Clinton's anticipated appointment will be those who defended Mr Obama's flanks on the campaign trail. By mocking Mrs Clinton's claims to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia or pouring scorn on her much-ballyhooed claim to have visited 80 countries as First Lady they successfully deflected the damaging charge that he is a lightweight on international issues.
Foremost among the victims of the purges is her old Yale Law School buddy Greg Craig, a man who more than anyone led the rescue of his presidency starting the very night Kenneth Starr's lurid report into the squalid details of the former president's sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky were published on the internet in 1998. Despite his long and loyal friendship with the Clintons, Mr Craig threw his lot in with Mr Obama at an early stage in the presidential election campaign. As if that betrayal to the cause of the Clinton restoration was not enough, Mr Craig did more to undermine Mrs Clinton's claims to be a foreign policy expert than anyone else in the some of the ugliest exchanges of the battle for the Democratic nomination.
The wars will rage on until economic circumstances force something else.
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Now that the anti-science, superstition-based initiative presidency is coming to an end, we need several public works science Manhattan projects to make us great again and boost us out of this Grotesque Depression. First we must provide free advertising-based wireless internet to everyone. Then we must criscross the land with high speed rail. We must develop microorganisms that may be freely distributed like bread yeast and become commonplace to improve our future. Because bovine flatulence is the major source of greenhouse gases, we must develop microorganisms which can be grow in the home that will provide all of our nutrition. Then we must create microorganisms which turn our sewage and waste into fuel. Since paranoid schizophrenia is the cause of racism, bigotry, homelessness, terrorism, ignorance, exploitation and criminality, we must provide put the appropriate medications, like lithium, in the water supply. We must require dangerous wingnuts who refuse free mental health care to be implanted with drug release devices and microorganisms. Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh were the ultimate superstition based initiatives. We should encourage international organizations to do likewise. In order to fund this we must nationalize the entire financial, electrical and transportation system and abolish the silly feudal notion that each industry should be regulated by its peers. Real estate and insurance, the engines of feudalism, must be brought under the Federal Reserve so we may replace all buildings with hazardous materials to provide public works. Insects, flooding and fire spread asbestos, lead and mold which prematurely disables the disadvantaged. Furthermore, as feudalism is the threat to progress everywhere, we must abolish large land holdings by farmers, foresters or religions and instead make all such large landholding part of the forest service so our trees may diminish greenhouse gases. We must abolish executive pay and make sure all employees in a company are all paid equally. We must abolish this exploitative idea of trade and make every home self sufficient through the microorganisms we invent.
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