Is the president really a 'moderate Republican'?

President Obama has been called a lot of things, but people on both sides are missing the obvious label, says Ezra Klein in The Washington Post: "Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s." The principles of his health care law, his cap-and-trade carbon credits, and his pairing of tax hikes with spending cuts were all Republican proposals before the GOP "abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him." Does this argument hold water?

Yes, Obama is basically a Republican: To makes progress with minimum partisan bickering, says Joseph Romm at Grist, Obama has clearly decided to embrace Republican policy ideas. Unfortunately, that means he "keeps getting suckered." Today's "soulless" Republicans have shown they're "perfectly willing to destroy the climate, block efforts to get health care to uninsured people, and generally ruin the economy — as long as they could destroy Obama."

"Ezra Klein: 'Obama, based on his positions, is a moderate Republican...'"

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Get real, Obama isn't a Republican: "This is a fairly common argument on the Left, but I really think it's mistaken," says Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Republicans never really wanted tax hikes, cap-and-trade, or individual health insurance mandates; these were just their counter-proposals to some Democratic ideas in the early 1990s. It's true that the GOP has since "moved considerably to the right," but that hardly means Obama is akin to a Clinton-era Republican.

"Is Obama a Republican?"

Who cares? Both parties are the same: It doesn't matter which party we slot Obama into, says Wick Allison in D Magazine. "Once in power, the two sides fundamentally agree." When it comes to presidential authority, foreign intervention, and fiscal discipline, do you think anything would be different "if the president today were Bush, McCain, Clinton, or Obama?" We don't even need a third party, just a second one.

"The one-party nation"