How Liberal is Obama?

Kevin Drum offers an insightful answer on Mother Jones.

Obama is the most liberal president since LBJ and he's also a fairly standard-issue mainstream Democrat. Obamacare, in particular, doesn't make him a radical. It just makes him lucky to have had a Congress willing to pass it.

But that's not because he's some kind of wild-eyed lefty. It's because there have only been two other Democratic presidents in the meantime, and both of them were relatively conservative. It's easy to forget now, but Jimmy Carter's strength in the 1976 Democratic primaries was largely based on his appeal to evangelical Christians. This spawned the ABC movement—Anybody But Carter—midway through the primaries, but it was motivated not by Carter's liberalism, but specifically by a fear among liberal Democrats that Carter was too conservative for the party. And he was. In office, Carter governed mostly from the center left, infamously opening himself up to a crippling primary challenge in 1980 from Ted Kennedy.

Ditto for Bill Clinton, who explicitly ran and governed as a centrist liberal. So is it fair to say that Obama is the most liberal president of the past half century? Sure, in the same way that it's fair to say that a Honda Civic is faster than a Toyota Corolla or a Chevy Cruze. But that hardly makes the Civic a speed demon.

After 30 years of ascendant Reaganism, it's probably normal for conservatives to feel that any kind of liberal agenda is extremist almost by definition. But that's little more than an unwillingness to accept the normal pendulum swings of American politics. As Kilgore points out, Obama's tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and national security policy have been to the left of George Bush, but not really much different from anything Bill Clinton would have done if he'd been able to. In the end, Obama is a Honda Civic to Clinton's Toyota Corolla. A little faster, but still not exactly a thunderbolt.