Barack Obama positions himself as the candidate of national unity, hope and reconciliation. It is a conceit, albeit a powerful one.
U.S. parties are split on almost everything, from Iraq to immigration, from taxes to health care. Bridging that real divide is easy rhetorically but much harder in practice.
Mr. Obama, rhetoric notwithstanding, is a standard Democrat. His policy differences with Hillary Clinton are minor, except that the same ideas seem to shape the nation's future in his mouth but define a better yesterday in hers.
The Illinois senator hasn't proposed anything outside of the party mainstream, which is quite smart, tactically speaking, in primary contests. But it's a stretch and a half to suggest any of his ideas are going to build durable bridges to Republicans, and so create a government of "change" based on the discovery of political unity.
What does Mr. Obama promise? Most arrestingly, he would withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of becoming president. He reasons that "the best way to press Iraq's leaders to take responsibility for their future is to make it clear that we are leaving." This is his biggest foreign policy bet. A lot of serious people believe that a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces would encourage Iraq's disintegration. He does not and, on this debate, much of the U.S. political year will turn.
Mr. Obama portrays himself - or, rather, many who want him to win portray him - as an advocate of "soft power" to restore his country's tattered image abroad. He favours doubling the U.S. foreign aid budget (try to slide that one through Congress), but he also proposes to add 100,000 men and women in uniform.
He would use U.S. military power "wisely," but he's already proposed bombing Pakistan if necessary to fight al-Qaeda, and he wrote in the magazine Foreign Policy that "I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened." There's nothing particularly exceptional in that sentence. Every candidate, Republican or Democrat, would reserve the same prerogative as president. And a Democrat must sometimes appear especially rhetorically robust on defence to ward off Republican attacks that the Democrats are weak on national security.
The rest of Mr. Obama's foreign policy is mainstream, safe and predictable, no matter how many references he makes to John Kennedy and Harry Truman. He would try to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian deal (which president has not?) and express unwavering support for Israel, work to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and listen more closely to traditional allies. Other candidates, including Republican John McCain and Democrat John Edwards, have many more new ideas.
On trade, Mr. Obama is again a mainstream Democrat, offering rhetorical flourishes about "protecting U.S. workers" and seeking "fair trade deals." His pledge to "fix NAFTA so that it works for American workers" is boilerplate Democratic Party stuff. He hasn't said how he would fix it or when.
Domestically, Mr. Obama's prescriptions are mildly liberal but again safe, predictable and statist. Whereas Ms. Clinton offers a welter of specific tax breaks to encourage this or that activity, Mr. Obama offers a flat $1,000 tax reduction for low-income people to put against their payroll taxes.
Like the other Democrats, Mr. Obama would repeal "most" (he doesn't say which ones) of the Bush tax cuts for the "wealthy." (Even the 2004 Democratic nominee, John Kerry, was more specific than that, because he pledged to roll back all tax cuts for those earning above $250,000.)
Mr. Obama offers a thicket of new spending programs for the disadvantaged, especially to improve educational opportunities. Indeed, he's got lots of new spending in his platform, one tax cut, and some taxes raised. Maybe later in the campaign, he will detail his now-vague fiscal policy.
His two big promises - again almost identical to those of his Democratic opponents - are the expansion of health-care coverage and aggressive action against climate change.
Nothing that Mr. Obama proposes is particularly arresting within the confines of the Democratic Party. Thus, it's not on policy ideas but, rather, on his persona that Mr. Obama became the party's darling.
