What is the evidence of Obama's different style of leadership

Robert Caldwell, the editor of the Opinion section of the San Diego Tribune says exactly what I've been wondering about Barack Obama. Where does he get off portraying himself as some new sort of change agent?

Then there's the disturbing disconnect between Obama's carefully crafted persona as a unifier and a supposed “trans-ideological” agent of change, and his actual record in office.

Obama is running, quite effectively, as both a change agent and an unconventional politician. That fits his campaign motif, a fresh-faced, idealistic outsider running against the Washington establishment voters so distrust. That, in turn, also suggests that Obama is a different kind of Democrat; one perhaps less reflexively partisan and divisive than, say, Hillary Clinton or John Edwards. Certainly that was an implicit message sent in his eloquent Iowa victory speech.

What's troubling, however, is that Obama's record doesn't match his reassuring persona.

The liberal Americans for Democratic Action rates Obama's voting record in the Senate at 97.5 percent, near perfection for liberal Democrats. The American Conservative Union, the ADA's ideological opposite, rates Obama's voting record at a rock-bottom 8 percent. Both ratings leave no doubt that Obama's actual votes mark him as a traditionally liberal Democrat, not a moderate.

Where in these votes is the evidence of trans-ideological change that Obama is selling so successfully on the campaign trail? Where in this record is the evidence that Obama is the unifier he claims to be?

On domestic, economic, foreign policy and national security issues, Obama's actual record is consistently liberal and consistently orthodox in Democratic Party terms. Obama typically talks like a centrist but votes like a liberal.

Obama's record also raises another disturbing matter – his penchant for ducking tough issues. In the Illinois Legislature, Obama compiled a record of voting “present” on controversial and politically explosive bills. However politically convenient, this isn't leadership. Obama's three years in the U.S. Senate are similarly devoid of any leadership examples on legislation of consequence.

This doesn't necessarily indict Obama's claimed leadership skills as fraudulent. It does demonstrate that those skills have not yet been in evidence in his legislative work. That's a curious, and worrying, fact.

Hillary Clinton couldn't have said it better.

It may well be that the voters, caught up in the glow of Obama's charisma don't really care. Or that, facing Edwards' angry mien and Hillary Clinton's high negatives, the Democratic and independent voters are willing to take a flyer on Obama's leadership. But Hillary does have a point that talking about change is not the same as achieving change. Unfortunately for her, despite her irritated rhetoric last night, she hasn't achieved change either.