Now that Senator Clinton is suspending her campaign and moving to unify the Democrats, the question arises as to how to judge Senator Obama. Should it be on the basis of his long association with such figures as, say, William Ayers, whose Marxism is anathema to most Americans, or the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose comments from the pulpit shocked the nation? Or should it be on the basis of the kinds of positions that Mr. Obama is starting to adopt formally, as he did, say, this week at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he moved sharply toward the center in respect of the Middle East?

Our own instinct is to incline toward the latter. We recognize this is a minority view on the right. But America has much experience with these kinds of things. We remember when we first read of Harry Truman’s private views about Jews. It happened to be in Michael Cohen’s book on “Truman and Israel.” It turns out that in the very letter that the future president wrote to propose his wife, Bess, he shared disgusting views on African Americans and Asians. And in a letter to a cousin, he aired his bigotry on Jews and Italians. It would have been enough to make the Reverend Wright blush.

Yet Truman went on not only to recognize the Jewish state within minutes of its declaring independence, acting in opposition to his own state department, but he also went on to be one of our greatest civil rights presidents, for which he would rank just for integrating the United States Army, though that’s not all he did. Even Nixon, who had no love for the Jews, raced to re-supply Israel in one of its darkest, and loneliest, hours. It seems that once a man accedes to the presidency, reality has a way of asserting itself. This may not guarantee a favorable outcome, but the record suggests that Mr. Obama will, should he win the election, enter an office into which many have grown.

At the Aipac conference, Mr. Obama’s statements in respect of Iran were remarkable for how different they were from what might have been expected of a congregant at Reverend Wright’s church. The evolution of his views was reported several days earlier, by our Eli Lake, under a page one headline in the Sun that said: “Obama Shifts Toward GOP On Iran,” adding that he would designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. That’s pure Bush-McCainism. Mr. Obama had barely spoken when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dispatched a report that Hamas had promptly withdrawn what had amounted to its endorsement of Mr. Obama.

Now, we’ve been on this beat long enough to know that what candidates tell the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not always an indicator of what a candidate is going to do. President Bush himself, back when he was but the governor of Texas seeking the White House, told attendees at the Aipac conference that he would start moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv “as soon as” he took office. Eight years later, he still hasn’t moved the embassy. Instead he dodged the issue via a waiver that was written into the law by Senators Feinstein and Schumer and used often by President Clinton — and even so emerged as the most pro-Israel president in American history.

Our point here is not that we don’t have enormous differences with Mr. Obama. The record of his party in recent years has been, by our lights, a disgrace to the war leadership of, say, FDR or Truman or even Kennedy. But the very unformed nature of Mr. Obama’s record leaves us with at least some rays of optimism that as this campaign unfolds, reality will begin to assert itself and he will be able to chart a course that is as much a challenge to his party as to the Republicans. It’s the best way, in our estimate, that he has for victory in November.