How does an aggressively no-drama president-elect respond to the most drama-filled, tragedy-crammed, emotionally fraught conflict on the planet, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Answer: very quietly.

His “one president at a time” mantra — George W Bush is in the job until January 20 — has become almost as automatic as his famous “Yes, we can”. Since election night, Obama has been, to most Americans, a blur of activity. But what has he actually said? He has given many press conferences, but almost all about appointments and none of them news-making. Many of us, weaned on soaring doses of his eloquence from the campaign, have had withdrawal symptoms.

And yet if you let the actions and inactions speak for themselves, as Americans seem to have done so far, the direction is clear enough: massive stimulus at home, caution and gradualism abroad. It’s immensely popular as a formula.

Take two huge news stories that exploded on Obama since November 4 — his appointment of the anti-gay evangelical Rick Warren as inaugural invocation speaker and the hilariously baroque Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, who put Obama’s old Senate seat up for auction. Either could have dominated the early symbolism of the transition, and set a tone for a restless, exhausted press corps. And yet neither story seemed to gain any real traction that hurt Obama.

Obama seems to have steered clear of Blago for years and was exonerated in the special prosecutor’s initial report; and Warren’s emergence created a huge kerfuffle on the blogs but it petered out quickly. The choice of Warren was, in retrospect, shrewd. It remains a symbolic act — asking an evangelical who is an opponent of civil marriage rights for gay couples to say a prayer. But it was also a statement from the White House that it considers the culture war between blue and red states, strident liberals and shrill conservatives, over.

This administration is not interested in exploiting divides to gain short-term political hits. The goal is, obviously, to maximise domestic support, to amass political capital and to bridge the divides that could alone, at this point, undermine Obama’s momentum.

Hence also the centrist appointments: you don’t put a protégé of John McCain such as Jim Jones and a Republican defence secretary, Bob Gates, into a Democratic cabinet and expect to become a hero of the left. But they have made Obama a hero for what’s left of the American centre.

Obama’s approval ratings — a whopping 82% — are now higher than Bill Clinton’s or Ronald Reagan’s at the same pre-presidential moment. Moreover, a full third in the latest Gallup poll said their opinion of the president-elect has improved since the election. A lot of that support has come from Republican voters who woke up after the election to find that the man their party had called a radical, terror-loving semi-socialist was nothing of the kind.

To be safer than sorry, Obama is managing expectations. Here’s a classic illustration of his cautious strategy, from before Christmas: “Two years from now, I want the American people to be able to say, ‘Government’s not perfect; there are some things Obama does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel like the government’s working for me. I feel like it’s accountable. I feel like it’s transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a president and an administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information, that believes in making decisions based on facts and on science as opposed to what is politically expedient.’ Those are some of the intangibles that I hope people two years from now can claim.”

Notice how Obama is less interested in establishing benchmarks for measurable policy success than describing a new mood towards government. It’s Blairite.

Unlike Tony Blair in 1997, however, Obama cannot glide on a benign public mood alone for long. He faces a global and domestic economic crisis and actually has a clear and ambitious agenda for government. On this, there is a great deal of certainty.

The one clear policy proposal that will define Obama just as clearly as Bush’s tax cuts did him is the stimulus package now being prepped on Capitol Hill and inside the Treasury. We know it will be a massive one — probably about a further $800 billion. It will be directed at restoring public confidence in the economic system, at investing in infrastructure, at accelerating moves towards a post-carbon energy platform, at relieving the healthcare distress of the working poor.

This massive once-in-a-generation chance to shift government’s relationship with the economy is Obama’s obvious and overwhelming priority. He is gambling that if it stimulates or is lucky enough to coincide with economic recovery, then he will bask in its glow for a long time. If it fails, of course, if it merely increases America’s already unmanageable debt and fails to shake its deep-rooted economic hangover, then he will be destroyed by it as well. Obama will either become a liberal Reagan, riding a recovery towards realignment, or a black Jimmy Carter, overwhelmed by forces he was unable to control.

What this tends to imply, I think, is relative caution and pragmatism abroad. Obama has wisely not interpreted his election victory as a mandate to overhaul America’s substantive policy agenda in the Middle East. That’s how he won the primaries, not how he won the general election.

This is not to say he will do nothing in foreign affairs in his first term. He is clearly planning to overhaul regional policy away from Iraq and towards Afghanistan, to withdraw as many troops as he can in Iraq without precipitating a collapse, and to be more even-handed in the Arab-Israeli conflict than the Bush administration. But it is to say that he is unlikely to make foreign policy his focus right away. On Israel, after all, Obama has very little domestic incentive to start a fight with Jerusalem in the near future.

His goal is to prevent a new war in Iraq, contain Iran and move the US past the torture-and-rendition regime of Bush-Cheney. That’s enough. Indeed, his approach to the Israel-Palestine issue is similar to his approach to many others. He knows what the rational “solution” is: a two-state partition along the lines of Taba in 2000. He also knows he cannot impose such a solution any time soon. And so his mojo almost certainly will be to remind all sides of this necessary pragmatic endgame, send Hillary to caretake and bide his time. It’s a second-term matter, the Middle East.

That doesn’t make it trivial — in fact, I doubt America’s long-term economic health can be sustained without serious retrenchment in the Middle East. I don’t doubt either that Obama does indeed want to move the region past the worsening religious conflicts. But he also knows that he needs deeper levels of domestic support if he is to succeed. Everything hinges on economic recovery at home. And if there’s anything we have learnt from observing Obama for the past couple of years, it is that he thinks strategically (remember those primaries).

So: the new presidency is about the economy until the world decides it isn’t. And Hamas and Israel will find out soon enough that he is not easily baited or pressured. Ask Clinton, or McCain.

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