SELECT YOUR VOTE

Mary Frances Berry: Obama’s rhetoric may be moving but he isn’t moving from the left to the center. He has never been on the left and has been a centrist all along. Back during the campaign he even opposed Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that everyone should be required to have health insurance. He also repeatedly declared his intention to expand military engagement in Afghanistan.
He rejected advice from Paul Krugman and other “progressive” economists to take-over the banks and to expand the stimulus to help unemployment recover more rapidly months ago. In June, when Apriil Ryan of American Urban Radio asked him at a news conference what he would do to “stop the bloodletting in the black unemployment rate,” he avoided the left’s proposals for WPA type jobs just as he did in his economic speech at Brookings. He carefully answered Ryan: “the best thing I can do for … whatever community-is to get the economy moving again.”
Too many people poured their own beliefs into Obama during his campaign without paying careful attention to his record and what he said. His rhetoric will emphasize whatever the polls tell him to emphasize but the policy hasn’t drifted. However, to be sure, the Democratic Party should benefit electorally in 2010 from a perception that Democrats in Congress and the President are becoming centrists whatever the reality.

Rory Cooper: On another topic: the Debt Limit. I cannot even entertain the narrative that after one decent speech Obama is moving to the center. President Barack Obama makes Jimmy Carter look centrist.
So instead, allow me to focus on something more tangible and realistic today: The Debt Limit. Next week, Speaker Pelosi is expected to use the Defense Department appropriations bill to increase our national debt to $1.925 trillion. Aside from the abhorrent strategy of using the troops as human shields for spending increases — as the left did with hate crimes laws earlier this year — this is a gross dereliction of duty. Raising the debt limit by 30% will only to serve to give this ‘Blank Check Congress’ more room to spend and spend and spend our borrowed dollars. And they have a choice, even if they tell you they don’t.

Just yesterday Speaker Pelosi forced through a $447 billion “minibus” spending bill filled egregiously with 5,224 earmarks, which raised discretionary spending by 8% for the third time since Pelosi took the gavel. In fact, discretionary spending has skyrocketed by 25% since she became Speaker. This mega-important spending included an 8.4% increase in the member’s office allowances. Seriously, in these tough times, Pelosi thought members needed better office design budgets by 8.4%. These folks are not the least bit serious about being fiscally responsible. Liberals will merely say Bush was a spender too. Great, congratulations on that argument. But we are in the here and now, and Congress is spending like sailors on shore leave.This must stop now. Because it won’t next year, and especially not after Obama gives another State of the Union full of goodies for lawmakers. According to the Heritage Foundation, if Washington simply returned to the $21,000/per household spending level of the 1990s (adjusted for inflation), than the budget would be balanced by 2012. That’s right, 2012! But let’s pretend that is just too hard, and we give them the $25,000/per household (adjusted for inflation) they were spending before the recession. Even that would lead to a balanced budget by 2019 without any tax hikes whatsoever. And if that is still too hard, at the very least they could cap discretionary spending for inflation (2.5%) for the next decade. Are any of these options even worth consideration to the liberal illuminati?

Speaker Pelosi’s House has passed a $700 billion bailout, a trillion dollar stimulus, a $1.5 trillion health care bill, a $200 billion Medicare ‘doc fix’ and an $800 billion cap and trade bill. They can’t say no. It’s high time someone said no. Please will someone be an obstructionist?

Grover Norquist: When Democrats run hard to the left and eventually run into opposition from the center-right American public the establishment press helpfully pretends that the constrained ambitions of then Clinton, now Obama are signs of reasonableness rather than defeat.

Clinton twice vetoed welfare reform. He folded when the GOP took the House and Senate and his consigliere Dick Morris told him he would lose in 1996 to Dole if he vetoed welfare reform a third time. It is laughable that this defeat is offered as Exhibit A of Clinton moderation and centrist tendencies. But it is. By well paid silly people who wonder why Americans tire of network "news."

We are now seeing that Obama, having won an election promising to reduce your health insurance costs, not raise your taxes, and never spend an additional dollar if it was not matched by spending reduction elsewhere has chosen to try and govern hard, hard, hard left. This is being poorly received by an America that now reports that on the generic ballot it will vote Republican for congress by a margin of 4 to 7 points so say Gallup and Rasmussen. Polls show strong opposition to the House and Senate plans to increase government control over health care. A whistleblower let the world know that the “science" of global warming has been secretly faked for decades.

Defeated leftists are not moderates. They are failed ideologues.

Steve Steckler: Yes, the President seems to be moving away from leftist, government-laden approaches for achieving the goals shared by most Americans. His Brookings speech was a symphony to my ears: at last a little real respect for the risks and effort undertaken by entrepreneurs. The next thing you know he’ll be talking about the evils of high marginal tax rates and the power of privatization in the public interest.
I’m beginning to get that breathless feeling my Obama-infatuated daughter was telling me about last year. There seems to be something like a six-month lag between the rightward progress of Obama’s rhetoric and his actions. What we observed last spring as a mismatch between his moderating rhetoric and the orders sent to Capitol Hill is still there, but the policy seems to be catching up: dropping the public option, the Afghanistan surge, backing off some threatened tax increases, etc.
At this rate, his Nobel speech presages a June invasion of Iran. My best hope is that the President maintains the lofty goals of his campaign but abandons the market-hating, liberal-interest methods of his most passionate campaign supporters.Once you’re president, you don’t really have to dance with the ones that brought you to the prom. But there are still warning lights flashing, such as EPA’s rogue threat to impose CO2 regulation without specific congressional authorization and the dangerous so-called compromise public option for health care. I’ve previously suggested the President find his inner Bill Clinton, but the Oslo speech has made me giddy enough to shoot for his inner John McCain.

Michael Kazin: When a conservative columnist praises you for acting like Bill Clinton (whom the right reviled and tried to throw out of office), it’s time to clarify things. Obama, like any good politician, adjusts his strategy as necessary in order to accomplish his goals: he has to compromise on health care because the legislation is held hostage by a handful of senators who, together, represent fewer people than Chuck Schumer. And he probably has to escalate in Afghanistan because he fears the collapse of both the Afghan and Pakistani governments if the US pulled out.
But he will still try to take aggressive steps to create jobs and to cut carbon emissions (which Krauthammer calls "socialist" in today’s Wash Post). Progressives may grumble, but Obama is the best president we are likely to get for many years to come.

Larry J. Sabato: Every successful Democratic president dashes back and forth between liberal and moderate ground, just as every successful Republican president scurries back and forth from conservative to moderate turf. It’s always a balancing act, keeping the ideological base happy while attracting enough moderates and firm independents to maintain a majority coalition. Base-tending is a task best suited to non-election years, such as 2009; coalition-broadening makes sense for election years (2010), in order to maximize the party’s appeal to voters in campaign seasons.

Assuming, as I do, that health care reform passes in the coming months, President Obama’s first year will have been a period of exceptional governmental activism and spending. We’re back to that reliable principle of political physics: "Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction." Much of the public is now concerned about overspending and debt. Democrats are going to hear an old refrain from Republicans in 2010-’tax and tax, spend and spend’. And the long-term projections for the national debt are genuinely frightening. Expect the Obama administration to shift to rhetoric that emphasizes fiscal conservatism in 2010.

Lanny Davis: For Peggy Noonan, the center seems to be to the left of Ronald Reagan - even if one inch to the left.

In fact, if Ms. Noonan studied Senator Obama’s career and political approach and record as president, she will find no significant change at all — he always has been and remains a center-left politician, and a pragmatic one at that who believes perfect is the enemy of the good — supporting Joe Lieberman as a member of the Senate Democratic caucus even after the Senator endorsed John McCain and supported President Bush’s policies in Iraq, appointing George Bush’s Defense Secretary as his Defense Secretary, George Bush’s Fed Chair as his Fed Chair, supporting the surge in Afghanistan, a health care bill without the public option, the death penalty, and non-prosecution of Bush officials.

Only through the ideological prism of a conservative Republican whose partisanship is well known but rarely disclosed openly would Ms. Noonan reach a conclusion that Mr. Obama has "moved" anywhere.

Thomas J. Whalen: Center? He’s moved well to the right, especially on foreign policy. What other conclusion is there after the former peace activist told the world yesterday that we should all give war a chance? Not exactly the season’s greetings I was looking for.

Mo Elleithee: With all due to respect to Peggy Noonan (and to my many friends on the left), I’m struggling to find this alleged “move to the center.”

On the three main issues of the day — the economy, health care, and the war in Afghanistan — the President seems to be in EXACTLY the same place he was during his campaign.

Noonan argues that the President’s emphasis on small businesses and tax cuts in his recent economic speech reflects some big shift in his rhetoric. I don’t buy it. Throughout his campaign, he talked about small businesses as an economic engine for the country, and pledged to do more to help them. He promised to deliver a middle class tax cut that would help more than 90% of American families — a promise he delivered early in his Administration.

On health care, again, the President is exactly where he was in the campaign. He talked about the need to provide a universal health care plan that would increase access, reduce costs, and be deficit neutral. Even after becoming President, he spoke of a public option as one means to getting there, but not as the ONLY means of getting there. The proposals that seem to gaining steam in the Senate right now are completely consistent with President Obama’s campaign promises, and the goals he set out after the election.And finally, on the war in Afghanistan, those who think the President’s speech in Oslo reflects some sort of major shift must not have been paying much attention to the 2008 campaign. He often talked about how, despite his opposition to the war in Iraq, he fully supported the decision to go into Afghanistan as morally just and important for national security. He criticized the previous Administration for taking its eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and promised to refocus our national security strategy by moving out of Iraq in order to concentrate more on Afghanistan. He spoke of just wars before, and made it clear that he believed Afghanistan was one of them. His decision to send more troops into Afghanistan, and his speech in Oslo, are completely consistent with where he’s always been.

So, is he “moving to the center?” As far as I can see, he’s where he’s always been. To those who claim that they’re surprised by his actions, I’d say don’t be. He’s doing exactly what he told us he’d do — and what the American people overwhelmingly elected him to do.

James Carafano: Tilting the Other Way?

The president has certainly stopped many right-wing critics in their tracks with his decision to not throw in the towel in Afghanistan and an ofttimes eloquent defense of the right of self-defense in his Nobel Prize speech. Perhaps, they opine "we are seeing a maturing president, maybe we have reached a turning point, maybe there is a little bit of realism in all of us?"
We’ll see. Let’s see what happens: 1) if things go bad in Afghanistan..what will the president do? 2) if the White House backs an "amesty" bill that puts the immigration issue back on the front pages, 3) if pushes healthcare and cap and trade bills and gets them passed no matter how bad they are, who was thrown under the bus, or what deals were cut to get them through; 4) if the president signs a son of START treaty that compromises American security. Let’s see if America’s enemies fear the backbone trumpted in the Oslo speech or take their signals from unending stream of failed compromises and negotiations that characterized the first year Obama diplomacy. Like the famous assessment of the "French Revolution" at the Paris Peace talks during the Vietnam War (what’s the impact of the revolution? too soon to tell.), its too soon to to say "here is the real Mr. President." 2010 will likely tell us much more about who leads America. Stay tuned.

Darrell M. West: President Obama hasn’t moved to the political center. He has been in the center since he took office. With the exception of winding down the Iraq War, he has been hawkish on foreign policy and moderate on social and fiscal policy. One-third of the economic stimulus package was for tax cuts (which many seem to have forgotten now). He dropped the public option when there were insufficient votes in the Senate. He is having difficulty meeting his own administration’s timetable for closing Guantanamo Bay. His Supreme Court nominee was not a flaming liberal. The GOP claim that he is a socialist is a complete joke given his governing record.

Greg Dworkin: What pundits like to do more than anything is proclaim they can read tea leaves better than anyone else. To do this, they need to brew weak tea and if the leaves don’t tell them what they want, they need to rearrange the leaves.
We can see the process with Obama almost on a daily basis. Having made up the nonsense idea that Obama was somehow governing from the left, some of the pundits have declared (and the rest will follow, lock-step) that Obama is pivoting to somewhere else. To say that Obama is becoming more conservative would be an outright lie (not that that stopped some of the modern pundits), so the new narrative is that he’s “becoming more centrist”.
Actually, he’s who he always was, surrounded by moderate aides and with moderate instincts (centrist is the conservative term for a right-center moderate, by the way. Obama was and is a moderate, Ben Nelson is a centrist.) What these pundits don’t recognize is where the center really is. They didn’t understand 2006 and 2008, and don’t understand what happening now because of it.

Timothy Stoltzfus Jost: President Obama has always been a centrist. That anyone should have been surprised that he is not a pacifist simply shows how little attention people have been paying to what he actually says and does, as opposed to the way in which he is often portrayed in the media. In the health care debate he has always held to the center. The ideas that he has championed–managed competition, tax credits to pay for private health insurance, keeping new expenditures to about 3% of existing expenditures, no real financial pressure on the drug industry, and no deficit spending–as well as his lukewarm and ambivalent support for the public plan, are not radical. Most of them are mainstream Republican ideas from an earlier time. The problem is that the right in America has moved so far and radically to the right, and so dominates the airwaves through its own media outlets, that it is hard to find the center any more.

Julian E. Zelizer: President Obama never left the center. If you look at his campaign platform and his first year of proposals, it is very clear that he comes out of the Clinton era Democratic Party. Some supporters always thirsted for more and his opponents have tried to label him as a socialist, but this was their agenda not his. I think that as the campaign moment fades, Americans are just getting a better sense of what he is about.