“Is he the affable front man for the business-as-usual hard-liners, a puppet president who offers soothing remarks, but little else? Or is he a genuine reformer who is edging Russia away from the more heavy-handed practices of Mr. Putin, but needs time to make his mark?”

What Clifford Levy writes in today’s New York Times about Dmitry Medvedev could easily be said about Barack Obama himself.

But unlike the new POTUS, who came to power from the opposition with a sweeping mandate for change, Medvedev has always been a member of the incumbent party; a successor rather than a challenger.

So, for all the tempting parallels with Obama, Medvedev-McCain is a much better fit when trying to set expectations for the Russian president.

Imagine if McCain had become US president. By many measures, he is a much more moderate, progressive and ideologically discrete politician than Bush. He was relatively liberal on social issues such as abortion and religion, denounced torture, and refused to jump on the anti-immigration bandwagon.

In fact, McCain’s reputation for pragmatism and bi-partisanship left many die-hard GOP partisans and their champions in the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, devastated, but gave him enough cross party clout to appeal even to liberal Hillary Clinton voters.

Medvedev – a non-ideological pragmatist with moderate leanings and liberal tastes – is in many ways to Putin what McCain was to Bush.

Levy quotes IrinaYasina, an analyst at the Institute for the Economy in Transition in Moscow:

“We so want to believe that things are getting better that we sometimes confuse our expectations with what is really happening. We so want to believe that there is a big difference between Putin and Medvedev. And sometimes our hopes prevent us from seeing the reality.”

Many on the American left are saying exactly this about Obama, astutely evoked by Naomi Klein in a recent Nation article. Yet such sentiments were also expressed during the early stages of the US presidential campaign with reference to McCain.

It’s worth remembering how susceptible liberal journalists and commentators were to the hardscrabble charms of the underdog aboard his Straight Talk Express. At that time, in late 2007, it was left to the few lonely Yasinas of the US media, such as Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, to shout: snap out of it!

So smitten were many liberal voters by McCain’s offers of a ‘sane’ and ‘commonsense’ republicanism after years of Bush’s cultural revolution that Democratic groups felt it necessary to launch a desperate campaign to brand him “McSame as Bush”.

Indeed, crushed by the forces of his party, McCain has already been forced to moderate his anti-torture stance and other maverick policies.

Is Medvedev McSame as Putin? According to Aleksei K. Simonov, president of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, “Medvedev is just pronouncing nice words. But there has been a complete lack of deeds.”

That’s not entirely true: he has, for example, enacted a wide reaching military reform, demonstrating his seriousness by sacking the intransigent head of military intelligence. He has also freed Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina from prison and made anti-corruption promises.

But as Ilya Milshtein points out in the opposition newpaper Grani.ru, many of these measures might have happened anyway; for instance the intelligence director had had a falling out with the defence minister and may have been removed on Putin’s orders.

Words matter, however, as Obama has himself said. In that sense, in ridding Russian politics of the macho Putinite vocabulary, Medvedev has already accomplished a kind of thaw.

But in the words of Milshtein, it is a ‘weak, cowardly thaw, quickly covered by fresh snow”.