Pres. Barack Obama, one of the most successful politicians this country has ever produced, made history even by taking the oath of office: He is the first president to be sworn in by a chief justice whose appointment he voted against. Watching this week’s rapid-fire confirmations of his cabinet selections, one couldn’t help but marvel at the irony.

Obama, with lots of media help, has skillfully hidden beneath a “unifier” veneer that belies the fierce inner partisan. He exudes a low-key cool. In his inner circle, the motto is “No drama”—as the administration’s funny uncle, Vice President Joe Biden, found out the hard way when he was taken to the woodshed over a classless jape about the chief justice’s oath-mangling. The new regime may be teeming with Clintonistas but, at least in its larval phase, it has an un-Clintonian sense of dignity and discipline.

But there’s style, and then there’s substance. Remember the nomination of that chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr.? Obama, then in the Senate for about five minutes, didn’t hesitate a moment before voting no. And let’s recall the setting. Roberts was among the most qualified nominees ever named to the high court. His performance at the Judiciary Committee hearings was a tour de force, awing not only combative Democratic senators but a mainstream press whose disdain for conservative jurists is Pavlovian. Perhaps most important: By the time Obama had to cast his vote, the Senate’s consent to Roberts’s nomination was assured—Obama was not on the Judiciary Committee, which had already approved Roberts by a 13–5 margin (a landslide by that committee’s standards for conservative nominees), and the chamber’s final tally was a lopsided 78–22.

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But Obama had no problem standing with 20 percent of lawmakers in opposing Roberts—just as he was content to be in a hard-Left fringe that opposed surveillance reform and, in Illinois, a ban on partial-birth abortion. Obama is a smart guy. He knew he couldn’t defeat Roberts, and he wasn’t trying to. He was trying to lead. He saw himself, quite perceptively, as the vanguard of an ideological movement, and he was doing what a vanguard does: showing the way.

For Obama, Roberts represented the adversary in countless ways: He embodied judicial restraint, hostility to Roe v. Wade, rejection of Obama’s theory that “positive rights” (i.e., welfare rights) may be discovered in the Constitution, deafness to claims that the Constitution may be read to ban that which it explicitly permits (e.g., the death penalty) and to permit that which it explicitly bans (e.g., race-conscious unequal protection), and so on. For what little it’s worth, I don’t agree with any of the now-president’s views on these matters. One needn’t agree, however, in order to admire his skill.

Opposing the Roberts nomination was not about beating a nominee. It was about making a point—or, rather, several points. It was about fighting, which is what vibrant movements do when high-stakes moments arise. It was about defining Obama by defining what he was against. It was about setting a bar to lead the opposition against future nominees. It was about putting down a marker for future elections: This is who we are, and this is who they are. It was about proving that Obama had the self-confidence to fight and the brains to know that fighting and losing often makes the team stronger in the fights to come.

The fight, the principled stand, is what stirs and catalyzes an ideological movement’s supporters. President Obama insists he is a pragmatist, not an ideologue, but that is a feint. Governing is an unavoidably pragmatic exercise, a choice between concrete, available possibilities. But those possibilities are not arrived at by pragmatism. They are driven by ideologies, by how elections define competing points of view and apparently resolve them. Obama, for example, may be closing Guantanamo Bay in a deliberate, pragmatic fashion. But this display of pragmatism is the fallout of a more fundamental decision: It is resolved that he’s closing the place. We had an election: The side that depicts Gitmo as a blight on America’s reputation made its case; the side that sees Gitmo as a crucial national-security asset didn’t show up. Obama’s side fought and won the big ideological argument about the direction of our policy. The “pragmatism” is just details.

The president has a winning political formula. Show up for all the big fights and get the rhetoric right, because the base needs the big fights and the rhetoric, even when pragmatism limits action’s ability to achieve rhetoric’s ambitions. Vote “present” if you have to, but resist voting for what you’re against because the precedent will kill you down the road; and, at all times, keep pushing the ball up the field—with the occasional long pass when the other side falls asleep, but otherwise with three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust, a strategy tailor-made for the Leviathan of a field we’re playing on.

THE GAME AND THE SYSTEM
Having mastered the game, Obama is now governing rather than challenging. This week, in his opening gambits, he pushed to get his cabinet approved. It was hard not to admire his agility, even while deploring his choices. He navigated confirmations of an attorney general whose last tour of duty ended in scandal, a Treasury secretary who evades income taxes, and a secretary of state whose tortuous financial conflicts would make Bernie Madoff blush.