It's always been. I agree with this story. Obama has contended that those who thought otherwise haven't been listening.
I'm so tired of left and right politics. It's inane. When people see only through a particular lens it skews the truth.
It's also why Karl Rove and other republicans advised republicans not to slap the liberal label on Obama. They knew it wasn't so. For the liberals out there, it's not a bad thing.
I believe Obama has a liberal heart but a practical mind. That's a very good thing for this country.
I believe Obama has a liberal heart but a practical mind. That's a very good thing for this country.
Politico: Throughout the left-wing blogosphere, the cry has come: Barack Obama is moving away from them, and to the center. “Moving to the middle is for losers,” cried the politically ambidextrous Arianna Huffington. He’s “betraying his claims of being a new kind of politician,” declared Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos.
But all this outrage ignores the obvious: Throughout his career, Obama has consistently framed himself as a post-partisan centrist. He’s been a bridge-builder all his life, first between black and white, and now between left and right.
It’s a formula for victory in a country that’s essentially center-right. Even after all the alienation from the Bush administration, a new Washington Post/ABC poll affirms that only 19 percent of Americans describe themselves as liberal, while 43 percent say moderate and 35 percent, conservative.
In his primetime introduction to the American people, giving the nominating speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama drew the loudest applause when he proclaimed, “there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.”
Whole chapters in his post-Senate-election book “The Audacity of Hope” extol the virtues of centrism — condemning inflexible activists on the far right and far left for stopping progress and alienating Americans from the political process.
From Newsweek: Obama doesn't divide the world into good and evil like Bush McCain.
Against that backdrop, Obama has been strikingly honest about his inclinations and inspirations. True, he begins by praising Harry Truman's administration, which in the foreign-policy world is a little like saying you admire George Washington. (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and John McCain have all cited Truman as a model.) But then Obama takes an unusual step, for a Democrat, and praises the administration of George H.W. Bush, one that is often seen as the most hardheaded or coldblooded (depending on your point of view) in recent memory. Obama has done this more than once, most recently in a conversation with me last week on CNN. And he is explicit about what he means. "It's an argument between ideology and foreign-policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush," he told The New York Times's David Brooks in May.
Obama rarely speaks in the moralistic tones of the current Bush administration. He doesn't divide the world into good and evil even when speaking about terrorism. He sees countries and even extremist groups as complex, motivated by power, greed and fear as much as by pure ideology. His interest in diplomacy seems motivated by the sense that one can probe, learn and possibly divide and influence countries and movements precisely because they are not monoliths. When speaking to me about Islamic extremism, for example, he repeatedly emphasized the diversity within the Islamic world, speaking of Arabs, Persians, Africans, Southeast Asians, Shiites and Sunnis, all of whom have their own interests and agendas.
Read the rest. Really good story
