Our politics at the federal level are going to be dominated in coming months with talk of battles over budget and policies. Overlaying all will be the economy and steps the government may - or may not - be taking to address ongoing concerns with the financial sector.

Yet, those are ultimately tactical issues. There are underlying strategic issues that may well become more clear than some of our friends on the left will care to admit.

For good or for ill, a Canadian has enunciated those realities rather clearly, including these thoughts:

a plurality of American voters had embraced Mr. Obama not because of, but despite the policies he was signalling [sic]. They most certainly liked the man and his "temperament," and they most certainly wanted the Republicans out. But it did not follow that they wanted their government to lurch to the left.

Good people can and will debate that, though it seems rather clear that Obama did much via mass communications during the campaign to mute the notion that he was advocating a liberal agenda - talk of tax cuts for 95% of Americans, going "line-by-line" through the budget, and generic talk of hope & change not exactly implying New Deal II.

Yet, in addition to that, there are the underlying competence questions were raised by the right last year but that are increasingly becoming a part of the center-left media Establishment as well. This isn't the centrism that kept the same Beltway and New York City-based crowd content during the Clinton years, it's pricey liberalism at a time of fiscal scarcity - and it's not even being handled well at that:

Mr. Obama was seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything, except political campaigns; but worse, his background was one-dimensional.

All his life, from childhood through university through "community organizing" and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.

He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as "avant-garde." His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is.

That's provocative, and debatable. Yet, the tilt of Obama's policies since Inauguration Day, compared to the centrist sounding vagueness of the campaign trail and the less than progressive nature of his Cabinet picks, are telling.

Don't believe me?

Let's put it this way then: when Frank Rich is raising huge red flags about Obama's handling of matters then there might be trouble brewing, well beyond the typical policy battles in which Presidents are engaged.