Tory Obama? Really?

Is Barack Obama really a closet Tory? That’s the question Andrew Sullivan asks in the light of this passage from David Remnick’s new Obama biography. Speaking about race in America and his election, Obama says:

“America evolves, and sometimes those evolutions are painful. People don’t progress in a straight line. Countries don’t progress in a straight line. So there’s enormous excitement and interest around the election of an African-American President. It’s inevitable that there’s going to be some backlash, potentially, to what that means—not in a crudely racist way, necessarily. But it signifies change, in the same way that immigration signifies change, in the same way that a shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy signifies change, in the same way that the Internet signifies change and terrorism signifies change. And so I think that nobody should have ever been under the illusion—certainly I wasn’t, and I was very explicit about this when I campaigned—that by virtue of my election, suddenly race problems would be solved or conversely that the American people would want to spend all their time talking about race.