Obama: A sudden move to the center

last updated 8 January 2015

Forgive me, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. In a column I wrote last week, I tried to list Barack Obama’s recent “brazen reversals of position” since securing the Democratic nomination for president. What I failed to realize at the time was that he “was just getting started.” In the space of a single week, this former darling of the extreme Left has also now: applauded the overturn of Washington D.C.’s handgun ban; denounced late-term abortion; promised to expand President Bush’s “faith-based” initiative in funding religious social organizations; backpedaled on his pledge to end the war in Iraq; and come out in support of the same domestic-wiretapping bill he had previously promised to filibuster. So is Obama the conventional liberal populist he appeared to be during the primaries, or the pragmatic centrist of the past few weeks? “I have no idea. Do you? Does he?”

Obama’s “dash to the center” is remarkable not just for its speed, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post, but for how it “falsifies the very essence of his candidacy.” With little to offer in the way of fresh policy ideas, Obama so far has based his entire campaign on a promise to practice “a new, more forthright and uncalculating politics.” It therefore seems odd, to put it mildly, that he’s suddenly indulging in such blatant calculation. “Tacking gently toward the center” is what most presidential candidates do come the general election, said Bob Herbert in The New York Times. But Obama isn’t so much tacking gently, as “lurching with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash,” among the idealistic 20-somethings and grass-roots activists who put him where he is today.

What Obama’s doing, said Andrew Sullivan in the London Sunday Times, is “slowly and subtly” winning an election. If the outraged partisans on the Left and Right study what he’s said in recent weeks, they’ll realize that Obama’s supposed “bald reversals” are actually small “adjustments” that are largely consistent with what he’s said all along. Obama was always a believer in the value of faith-based social programs, for example, and has long supported the right to own guns. He always said we needed to be as “careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.” To take these positions is “not a manifestation of cynicism,” but proof that Obama is the Republican Party’s worst nightmare: a charismatic and cunning strategist who knows that the center is where presidential elections are won.