Dan Balz at the WaPo titled his piece today “Obama’s Ideology Proving Difficult to Pinpoint” which makes me laugh. Only a reporter would say that its hard to pinpoint Obama’s ideology. He is rated the most liberal Senator in the Senate. He ran as a hard-core leftist against Hillary Clinton who he tried to portray as some kind of hawk (laugh). He wants to raise taxes and increase spending. He would meet with Iran and Venezuela without precondition. He wants to retreat from a war we are winning. He desires a stronger nanny state where your taken care of from cradle to grave. He strong support of abortion pushes him farther left then NARAL believing that even babies who survived an abortion should not be protected. He endorsed the gun ban in DC and strongly supports giving Constitutional rights to foreign aliens fighting our country and fighting this war on terror like a law enforcement issue.
He is a radical leftist and its amazing that someone who is so close to being a Marxist is this close to the Presidency. Its equally amazing that reporters can’t pinpoint his ideology with all the evidence in front of them…maybe its his religion that is hypnotizing them:
More likely its the fact that they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that Obama is now flopping like a fish to move to the center. Victor Davis Hanson spells out the fact that since Obama has been trying to move to the center he is now looking more like Bush then anyone else.
…Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts.
Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court’s overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns.
The senator, also like Bush, supports the death penalty. He recently objected to the court’s rejection of a state law that allowed for the execution of child rapists.
And although Obama is still pro-choice, he now, like the president, thinks “mental distress” should not justify late-term abortion.
In addition, the new Obama would like to continue — and even expand — Bush’s controversial faith-based initiative program of involving churches in government anti-poverty programs.
In fact, Obama is sounding a lot these days like those red-state, small-town conservatives he once caricatured in his infamous comment about Pennsylvanians who “cling” to such hot-button, but extraneous, social causes.
Consider also the campaign trail. Like a Republican in good standing — but unlike the maverick John McCain — Obama has, by his sudden forgoing of public funds, rejected the idea of campaign-finance reform.
In fact, he’s the largest raiser of private cash in American political history, and seems to have dropped opposition to accepting pernicious “special interest money.” Like a Republican, he raises the most among the nation’s wealthiest on Wall Street.
During the primaries, Obama seemed to advocate the dismantling of the North American Free Trade Agreement. But now candidate Obama has little desire to overturn the present Bush trade policies.
On foreign policy and the war against terror, Obama once leaned left in his primary battles against Hillary Clinton. But his latest mutations move him once again closer to George Bush.
For all his prior talk of the loss of civil liberties, a President Obama, like a President Bush, would give telecommunication companies exemption from lawsuits over tapping private phone calls at government request.
Obama wants to continue Bush’s successful multilateral efforts to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, and now praises the Bush-inspired six-party talks with North Korea that led to the apparent dismantling of Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Like Bush, he advocated expanding the military after the Clinton-era troop cuts. Obama once advocated lifting the embargo against Cuba — but no longer. Like Bush, he thinks that it is wise to leave it be.
There is suddenly not much difference when it comes to the Middle East, either. Palestinian supporters were dismayed to hear Obama promise that Jerusalem must be Israel’s eternal and undivided capital.
Obama once criticized Bush for his unwillingness to meet directly with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and exaggerating the danger from Iran, which supposedly didn’t “pose any serious threat.” Lately though, he agrees with the president that Iran now in fact is a “grave threat.”
Obama’s most serious about-face is on Iraq. He once promised a rigid and rapid timetable for withdrawing our troops. But given the radical success of Gen. David Petraeus’ surge and change in tactics, Obama is now calling for withdrawals to be based on the conditions on the ground in Iraq.
And the reporters are falling for it obviously.
Only the most dimwitted could actually believe that Obama is now suddenly a centrist.
See author page