By JOHN HARWOOD


WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama can already boast one striking accomplishment: persuading partisan, ideological adversaries to see him in a less partisan, less ideological light.


The reappraisal runs deeper than Mr.Obama’s public pleasantries with Senator John McCain. Derided during the campaign as a purveyor of “socialism” who was guilty of “palling around with terrorists,” he has since won praise from conservatives for retaining Robert Gates as defense secretary, for naming General James L.Jones as his national security adviser and for selecting the moderate Timothy F.Geithner, who helped draw up the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout plan, as his Treasury secretary.

Karl Rove, President Bush’s former adviser, has called Mr.Obama’s economic team“reassuring,”and other Bush alumni agree.“Obama is doing something marvelously right,”Michael Gerson, Mr.Bush’s onetime senior speechwriter, wrote in The Washington Post.“He is disappointing the ideologues.”

More remarkably, Mr.Obama has reaped those plaudits without seeming to abandon his commitment to the same policies that conservatives routinely attacked during the campaign - his pledge to expand health care coverage, to withdraw troops from Iraq and to increase government spending on infrastructure and alternative energy projects. On the contrary, Mr.Obama has indicated that he will follow his belief in activist government with an economic stimulus package much larger than what he proposed in the campaign.

All this raises the question: can Mr.Obama indeed be forging the new style of politics he invoked so often during the election - one that transcends the partisan divisions that have marked recent administrations- If so, what will he replace it with, a bipartisan style of governance that splits the differences between competing ideological camps, or a “postpartisan” politics that narrows gaps or even renders them irrelevant?

Actually, insiders in Mr.Obama’s emerging team foresee a third option: a series of left-leaning programs that draw on Americans’ desire for action and also on Mr.Obama’s moderate, even conservative, temperament, to hurdle the ideological obstacles that have lately paralyzed Washington.

Not that Mr.Obama is the first president- elect to offer soothing words.“We are all Republicans, we are all Democrats,” Jefferson declared in his Inaugural Address in 1801, before the modern party system had taken root.

Later presidents have said much the same thing. But time and again, ideological divisions have thwarted the promise of nonideological problem-solving. In all three presidential elections of the 21st century, voters have split along clear ideological lines.

Last month’s exit polls showed Mr.Obama winning the votes of just one in 10 Republicans and one in 5 conservatives. But the tone of political discussion in recent weeks suggests several reasons to expect something new.

Beyond the transition appointments, Mr.Obama has persuaded some conservatives, at least for now, that he really is open to their ideas. Meeting with the nation’s governors in Philadelphia, he pointedly and publicly reached out to the Republican executives.“As long as he’s smart and he listens and he sets a big table, we have a chance to do business,” said Bernadette Budde of the Business- Industry Political Action Committee, an influential voice for corporate America in Washington.

There is also the boost Mr.Obama has received from the Republicans’ disarray.“I don’t think there is such a thing as post-partisan or post-ideological politics, but there is such a thing as one side being so shell-shocked and/or incompetent that it is incapable of presenting an alternative vision,” said Dan Mitchell, a conservative economic analyst at the Cato Institute.

The economic downturn is breeding defections from the ranks of ideological purists. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has said the financial crisis caused him to reexamine his free market views. Martin Feldstein, a top economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, now advocates big federal spending. Mr.Bush himself proposed a $700 billion bailout for financial institutions.

As a result, said Peter Wehner, a onetime deputy to Mr.Rove who is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center,“Obama has more latitude when it comes to the role of government in the economy.”

Mr.Wehner’s hopes for Mr.Obama are pinned, to some extent, on hints that he will forgo tax increases on affluent Americans.

But that is precisely the kind of shift that worries a very different but also ideologically inflected group: Obama backers on the progressive left, particularly the legions who embraced his campaign on the Internet. As Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the influential Web site DailyKos, says, “I don’t want him to split the difference.”


President-elect Barack Obama, at a 2006 meeting with President Bush, has promised to move the United States beyond partisan politics./TIM SLOAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES