Barack Obama loses his base with rightward drift

A month after he won the White House, Barack Obama is drawing a chorus of approval from conservatives who spent most of this year denouncing him as a man of the extreme left. "Reassuring," says Bush's master-strategist, Karl Rove, of Obama’s cabinet selections.

In Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, mouthpiece of the neo-cons, Michael Goldfarb, reviewed Obama's appointments and declared happily that he sees "nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term."

But on the liberal-left end of the spectrum, where Obama kindled extraordinary levels of enthusiasm throughout his campaign, the mood is sour. "How... to explain that not a single top member of Obama's foreign policy/national security team opposed the war?" Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of the Nation, asked on Monday.

She went on: "For Obama, who's said he wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn't it have made sense to include at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century?"

Suddenly a familiar spectre is shuffling back under the spotlights – Iran

Similar sentiments came from another well-known left-wing reporter, Jeremy Scahill, who wrote on Tuesday: "The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neo-liberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George H W Bush's time in office to the present."

Suddenly a familiar spectre is shuffling back under the spotlights. A long piece on Obama's foreign policy advisors last Tuesday carried the headline, "Are Key Obama Advisors in Tune with Neocon Hawks who want to Attack in Iran?"

The author, Robert Dreyfuss, sketched in the political backgrounds of advisors to Obama and concluded that "Tony Lake, UN ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle, and Dennis Ross, along with leading Democratic hawks like Richard Holbrooke, close to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden or Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, have made common cause with war-minded think-tank hawks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and other hardline institutes."