Obama's Tilt to the Center

Much has been made about Barack Obama's so-called move to the political center since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. Criticism from the left was summed up by Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

One issue or another might not have made much difference. Tacking toward the center in a general election is as common as kissing babies in a campaign, and lord knows the Democrats need to expand their coalition.

But Senator Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.

Other center-left commentators offer a different view. Gail Collins followed Herbert's column in the Times with one asking "what did you expect?"

Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, who may know Obama better than most pundits, said similar things in today's column.

Much of Obama's perceived shift in positions comes because he was not pressed on the issues that much earlier. He navigated the primaries as a Rorschach candidate, an inkblot test in which Democratic voters tended to see what they wanted to see, not always where he actually stood on various issues.

That's why Obama appears to be following Nixon's old dictum: Run toward your party's base in the primaries, then move back to the center for the general election. Bill Clinton did the same, calling it "triangulation." Obama's taking a risk by following the same strategy, but he's smarter to lurch to the middle of the road in midsummer than to risk becoming road kill in the fall.

Obama's shift on FISA has been particularly disappointing. However, I am convinced that "the partisan fight" isn't winnable by either side and that the collateral damage sustained in waging it is unacceptable. I am willing to accept some less-than-ideal compromises in the name of moving forward with solutions over ideological posturing.