Thomas Frank: Obama Should Act Like He Won

As we anxiously await the debut of the Obama administration, we hear more and more about the incoming president's "post-partisan" instincts. He has filled his cabinet with relics of the centrist Clinton years. He has engaged the evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. And according to Politico, he wants 80 Senate votes for his stimulus plan -- a goal that would mean winning a majority among Republicans as well as Democrats.

Maybe these will turn out to be wise moves. Maybe they won't.

Audacity they ain't, though. There is no branch of American political expression more trite, more smug, more hollow than centrism.