Obama’s temperament was eloquently expressed by the late Bart Giamatti, a former president of Yale and former baseball commissioner, when he urged students not to fall prey to ideology from the right or left and to celebrate the democratic process that balances the two extremes. “My middle view is the view of the centrist,” he said, before quoting law professor Alexander Bickel, “who would ... fix ‘our eyes on that middle distance, where values are provisionally held, are tested, and evolve within the legal order derived ... from the morality of consent.’ To set one’s course by such a centrist view is to leave oneself open to the charges, hurled by the completely faithful of some extreme, of being relativistic, opportunistically flexible, secular, passive, passionless ... Be of good cheer ... To act according to an open and principled pragmatism, to believe in the power of process, is in fact to work for the good.”
TIME: Fareed Zakaria
