At least in Virginia Postrel’s parlance:

Obama’s memoir is not a policy tome or a campaign biography but an emotional journey. It does not offer alternatives, only bleak observations and predictions. It is pessimistic, conservative, nostalgic. The theme running through Dreams from My Father is the search for order, for stability, for roots in an undisturbed pre-modern culture. How that yearning for stasis translates into presidential policy is not clear, but I worry.

Me, too. It’s questionable whether most of his nostrums are really “change,” but if they are, they’re not change I can believe in.