It turns out change was just a word not a policy

Rich Lowry:

CHANGE has rarely looked so much like continuity.

Barack Obama's leftward positioning and achingly idealistic rhetoric in the Democratic primaries harkened back to George McGovern or Robert Kennedy. His personnel choices during the transition instead recall Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts technocrat who notoriously ran on competence.

Obama is too savvy a marketer to have tried to make a campaign slogan out of practicality. But who would have guessed that when he lit up the crowd back in 2007 at Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner with his signature speech denouncing the ways of Washington and Democrats who accommodated Bush foreign policy, he harbored a secret desire to draw on experienced Republicans to manage his national-security policy?

Obama has selected a former Marine commandant close to John McCain, Gen. Jim Jones, as his national-security adviser; asked President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Bob Gates, to stay on; and selected Hillary Clinton, a relative centrist who denounced Obama's naivete in the primaries, as secretary of state.

It's as moderate as any Democrat's national-security picks could possibly get. Just when it seemed that the hawkish Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party was dead forever, a jerry-built version of it is making a comeback via the impending administration of a man championed by anti-war zealots. Yes, God does have a sense of humor.

The success of the surge in Iraq made Obama's pragmatic turn easier. Perhaps never has someone owed so much to a policy he opposed so vehemently. First, the success of the surge diminished the Iraq War as an issue in the general election. Second, it makes it possible to contemplate a responsible drawdown in Iraq.

On the campaign trail, Obama pledged to end the war in 2009. That's a non-starter. He still talks of getting out in 16 months, but in his press conference announcing his national-security team emphasized that he'll listen to his commanders and said that the recent security pact with Iraq "points us in the right direction." Our straight-shooting commander on the ground in Iraq, Ray Odierno, opposes a 16-month withdrawal, while the US-Iraqi security pact envisions a US exit in three years.

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It makes you wonder about the sincerity of all that opposition to the Bush policies in Iraq. It will also be interesting how the MoveOn base of the party will react to the lack of respect theya re getting. If they don't feel like they have been used they should.

Obama did appoint Susan Rice to the UN. She is not nearly as smart as the media would lead you to believe. She is closer to the UN bureaucrats than to the American public on many issues. We will have to keep an eye on her and the UN.