Obama Was Never a Leftist

Andrew Sullivan: None of this even faintly surprises me. The picture of Obama as a big-time leftist was always wrong – and more a function of the Clintons’ need to marginalise him than of any accurate portrayal of his record. His 2002 speech against the Iraq war aired a prescient worry about unintended consequences, not a deep reluctance to use military force in any circumstances.

Obama has long been a committed Christian, even of a more liberal, mainstream variety than the Republican leadership. His embrace of faith-based programmes is therefore utterly unsurprising to anyone who knows him. (The one key difference between Bush’s faith-based programmes and Obama’s is that Obama’s forbids religious charities from using public money to discriminate in hiring on the basis of faith.)

Obama also explicitly favoured the death penalty for child rapists and murderers in his book The Audacity of Hope. These are not, for the most part, U-turns or manifestations of cynicism. They are pragmatic adjustments made by a Democrat who wants to win.

This election will be about who can deliver the most change in a way that least disturbs an anxious electorate. McCain reassures in as much as he is obviously not a simple heir to Bush and Dick Cheney. But his refusal to countenance any tax increases or entitlement cuts in a debt-laden America, and his visceral hostility to diplomacy and nuance in the politics of the Middle East, worry many who have been rattled by the reckless rigidity of the Bush years.

Obama’s main liability has always been that he may be too inexperienced for an America at war and too culturally different from heartland America to win it over. In the past few weeks he has done a much better job in removing his liabilities than McCain has. This election, unlike the past two, will be won in the centre. It’s a centre in which Obama looks increasingly at home.