SO IS MR. LIZZA ONE OF THE OPPONENTS?:

As a new President, Obama did not anticipate how effectively his political opponents would cast him as a polarizing figure. Despite the bonhomie at Will's house, most Republicans viewed him as a wily Chicago politician cosseted by a sympathetic liberal media. The over-all description was a caricature, but there is enough in Obama's political biography for Republicans to make a case. In fact, his ascent from law professor to President in a decade was marked by a series of political decisions that undercut some of his claims on the subject of partisanship and political reform.

In 1996, during his first run for office, in the Illinois State Senate, Obama defeated his former political mentor Alice Palmer by successfully challenging her nominating petitions and forcing her off the ballot, effectively ending her career. A few years later, Illinois Democrats, after toiling in the minority in the Senate, gerrymandered the state to produce a Democratic majority. While drafting the new political map, Obama helped redraw his own district northward to include some of Chicago's wealthiest citizens, making the district a powerful financial and political base that he used to win his U.S. Senate seat, a few years later.

Another hard-edged decision helped make him the Democratic Presidential nominee. In early October, 2007, David Axelrod and Obama's other political consultants wrote the candidate a memo explaining how he could repair his floundering campaign against Hillary Clinton. They advised him to attack her personally, presenting a difficult choice for Obama. He had spent years building a reputation as a reformer who deplored the nasty side of politics, and now, he was told, he had to put that aside. Obama's strategists wrote that all campaign communications, even the slogan--"Change We Can Believe In"--had to emphasize distinctions with Clinton on character rather than on policy. The slogan "was intended to frame the argument along the character fault line, and this is where we can and must win this fight," the memo said. "Clinton can't be trusted or believed when it comes to change," because "she's driven by political calculation not conviction, regularly backing away and shifting positions. . . . She embodies trench warfare vs. Republicans, and is consumed with beating them rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done. She prides herself on working the system, not changing it." The "current goal," the memo continued, was to define Obama as "the only authentic 'remedy' to what ails Washington and stands in the way of progress."

Obama's message promised voters, in what his aides called "the inspiration," that "Barack Obama will end the divisive trench warfare that treats politics as a game and will lead Americans to come together to restore our common purpose." Clinton was too polarizing to get anything done: "It may not be her fault, but Americans have deeply divided feelings about Hillary Clinton, threatening a Democratic victory in 2008 and insuring another four years of the bitter political battles that have plagued Washington for the last two decades and stymied progress."

Neera Tanden was the policy director for Clinton's campaign. When Clinton lost the Democratic race, Tanden became the director of domestic policy for Obama's general-election campaign, and then a senior official working on health care in his Administration. She is now the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, perhaps the most important institution in Democratic politics. "It was a character attack," Tanden said recently, speaking about the Obama campaign against Clinton. "I went over to Obama, I'm a big supporter of the President, but their campaign was entirely a character attack on Hillary as a liar and untrustworthy. It wasn't an 'issue contrast,' it was entirely personal." And, of course, it worked.

The fourth momentous decision of Obama's political career provided the financial boost that made him President. On June 19, 2008, he announced that he would be the first Presidential candidate since 1976 to forgo public funds, which allow candidates to run in the general election while limiting the corrupting influence of fund-raising. This was an awkward and hypocritical decision, given that in 2007 Obama had explicitly promised that he would stay in the system. David Plouffe, his campaign manager, wrote in his memoir, "The Audacity to Win," that the promise had been a mistake: "We were overly concerned with making sure the reform community and elites like the New York Times editorial board, which care deeply about these issues, would look favorably on our approach." Obama, Plouffe noted, was "genuinely torn," but was eventually convinced that victory trumped idealism. Obama's choice allowed him to raise unlimited amounts of money while John McCain, who remained in the system, was limited to a check from the government for eighty-four million dollars. From September 1st to Election Day, Obama outspent McCain by almost three to one, and, as many Republicans are quick to note, ran more negative ads than any Presidential candidate in modern history.

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