Read his books and you'll see that, despite the fact that Obama holds strikingly liberal views on a variety of issues, his anger at the Bush administration is directed not at its policies, but at its politics.  For Obama, Bush's supreme betrayal was in breaking the Rawlsian consensus.  Bush's extreme partisanship, his utter disregard of the Democratic members of his government, turned Americans against each other and polarized the electorate.  For Obama, that was Bush's greatest crime -- because to the President, we are a nation of consensus before we are a nation of laws or dreams or anything else.

It's the only interpretation that explains Obama's baffling and infuriating rejection of progressives and his embrace of the moderate wing of the Republican party.  It's the only interpretation that explains his choice to elevate people like Judd Gregg, Ray LaHood, and John McHugh, who committed the unforgivable sin of voting to impeach a President because they didn't like him, to high posts in his administration.  It's the only interpretation that explains his active support of Republican Arlen Specter against Democrat Joe Sestak.  It's the only interpretation that explains his unwillingness to proceed in passing legislation without Republican support, or to pressure his party's Majority Leader to eliminate the Senate's pernicious filibuster rule and strip Republicans of their last vestiges of power.  Obama does these things not because Mr. 68% in the polls needs the additional support, but because he truly believes that Republicans within the overlapping consensus are more important than Democrats outside it.  The consensus, for Obama, is more important than the outcome.

John Rawls was a great thinker, and Barack Obama is a great man.  But by excluding the unreasonable from meaningful political participation, they have ensured that only mediocrity can emerge from the political system they both venerate.  And in these troubling times, mediocrity just isn't good enough.  So I'm proud to declare myself a member of the unreasonable.  It's the only place where great change happens, where democracy succeeds fully, and where populism reigns.  In the Rawlsian world, where the practical defines the realm of possibility, the necessary simply cannot triumph.