Several “moderates” are expressing surprise that President Obama has turned out to be so liberal in terms of domestic policy. Here’s the latest example from Stuart Taylor, writing in National Journal:
Having praised President Obama’s job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.
It’s nice to see concern about the potential government take-over of so much of our economy (and our lives really, if you think about the consequences and real-life effects of carbon taxes, healthcare nationalization, growing regulation of employment contracts, increased government transfer programs, etc), but it is also troubling. What possibly made these moderates think that President Obama was anything but a redistributionist liberal? He has the most liberal voting record of any Senator. That doesn’t happen by accident. He has, for all intensive purposes, never gone against a liberal constituency. Sure, he has flirted with ideas that annoy the teachers unions, but that has yet to materialize into real policy.
Seems as though there was a lot of willful ignorance on the part of many centrists (fueled, no doubt, by the mainstream media that never seriously examined Obama’s policy record or statements).