Barack Obama’s young supporters are discovering that their candidate is hardly the champion of the “new politics” he promised to be. Now that their primary and caucus votes are safely counted, and Hillary Clinton has been dispatched back to the Senate, the Democratic presidential candidate elect is racing toward the political center.

Like a sinking hot air balloonist, he is madly throwing out ballast and baggage to stay aloft in what is turning out to be a far more tightly contested race than he had bargained for.

Until recently, the indicators suggested that all Senator Obama needed to do to become president was to put his feet up and wait until November. President Bush’s unpopularity rivals that of Richard Nixon in his carpet biting days.

After nearly eight years, the Republicans are largely discredited and their ideas widely derided. The war in Iraq is unpopular. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. Gas prices are soaring. House prices are plunging. Credit is tight. Home reclamations are rife. The American economy is walking a fine line between recession and gloom.

All this terrible news is good for Mr. Obama. Democratic pundits are agreed that 2008 will be a change election. Mr. Obama is a fine speaker, an attractive family man, and a strong candidate. What could go wrong?

Yet in the honeymoon between Mr. Obama beating the Clintons and receiving the acclamation of his party in Denver next month, he is being nudged by his rival, Senator McCain, the ancient mariner. Since the turn of the month Mr. McCain has been enjoying a surge in support according to RealClearPolitics. Currently, the gap between Messrs. McCain and Obama is 5.5%.

Mr. McCain’s attractiveness to Democrats that Mr. Obama has failed to reach is making the party’s traditional backers deeply anxious. At a New Jersey fundraiser a couple of weeks ago attended by Governor Corzine, the deep pocketed Democratic donors I spoke to split between those who accepted Mr. Obama’s candidacy with a heavy heart and half expected him to lose and those who were in plain despair at his prospects.

One longtime giver, who had backed Mrs. Clinton to the end, was so certain Mr. Obama would be defeated he said the very thought of the general election “makes me nauseous.”

Mr. Obama’s response to Mr. McCain’s remarkable popularity has been to reach out as fast as he can to the independent and blue collar voters the Arizona senator has thus far called his own. For Mr. Obama, this means junking positions that kept his devoted MoveOn.org fan base sending their $20 bills, putting in their place policies that until recently Mr. Obama openly derided.

Contrary to his previous announcements: Mr. Obama now favors capital punishment, if not for murderers, at least for child rapists; he now thinks maintaining a mother’s mental health is no reason for an abortion; far from poking fun at those who “cling to guns,” he now says he thinks the Washington D.C., handgun ban was illegal all along; far from sneering at those who “cling to religion,” he has cosied up to evangelical Christians and encouraged “faith based initiatives”; he now believes public campaign financing is too flawed to accept; he now thinks it rash to take tea with the world’s tyrants without “preparations.”

Most important of all, at least to his battalions of young volunteers, he is now not sure he can order a couple of brigades home from Iraq safely every month. His previous position, that he would tell the top brass to proceed with a total withdrawal from Iraq with immediate effect, is to be “revised.”

It may be undignified, but Mr. Obama is doing the right thing by throwing overboard policies not wanted on the next stage of his journey. Winning candidates traditionally accommodate the views of their primary supporters before jettisoning them ahead of the general election. And better do it now, in the summer when people have more important things on their minds, such as the heat and the beach, than after Denver.

Denver is a place to display party unity, and woe betide anyone who dares do otherwise. Mr. Obama is taking it for granted that a large proportion of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters will not back him in November. The fact that he has adopted the very position on Iraq with which he used to paint Mrs. Clinton as a reckless warrior will come as no surprise to them. They never believed for a moment that reciting the words “change” and “hope” and “yes we can” amounted to “new politics.” They are not disillusioned because they never had any illusions.

Many of those who have been with him since the start also are furious, as a visit to Mr. Obama’s own Web site shows. So far “more than 20,000” Obama supporters, according to “Computerworld’s” calculation, have protested against his trimming on domestic phone tapping. For those young idealists, Mr. Obama is a fallen idol who has shown himself as a conniving politician in the old mold.

Mr. Obama has figured that by swinging sharply to the right he will lose fewer of his core coalition of young people, rich idealists, and African-Americans than he will gain independents and blue collar “Reagan Democrats.” Whether he is right, and whether he can beat Mr. McCain in the middle ground, we must wait until November to find out.

nwapshott@nysun.com