Where do you think President Obama stands in terms of being progressive vs. centrist/conservative?

[Douglas Carpenter]

22 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	I think the President is really a progressive who tries to advance a progressive agenda as much as is politically possible
	3 (14%)
	I think the President serves only the interest of Wall Street and corporate power and has no real political philosophy
	1 (5%)
	I think the President is moderately center-left like many post-New Deal Democrats and attempts as much as is politically viable to advance that point of view
	5 (23%)
	I think the President is moderately center-right like what would have once been a moderate Republican and attempts to advance that agenda as much as is politically feasible.
	11 (50%)
	I think the President is more of a technocratic professional administrator who is really not ideological and who is guided more by viability than philosophic considerations
	2 (9%)
	Pasta al dente or slightly undercooked pasta is certainly preferable to overcooked pasta.
	0 (0%)
	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[quinnox]

1. I picked -

"I think the President is more of a technocratic professional administrator who is really not ideological and who is guided more by viability than philosophic considerations"

I like how you put that.

[LostOne4Ever]

2. Im sorry

Fully cooked pasta is far preferrable to al dente.

[Douglas Carpenter]

14. I'm pretty sure posting that is a TOS violation

[cui bono]

27. Why do you hate al dente?

I heard al's a really nice guy.

[LostOne4Ever]

36. Hes too stiff for my tastes

And Al Fredo is too rich and fatty.

[cui bono]

49. Yeah, that's why Marinara had to dump him.

She then went out with Al Fresco.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. I chose this

I think the President is moderately center-right like what would have once been a moderate Republican and attempts to advance that agenda as much as is politically feasible.

The president even said as much. So if he did that.. Who am I to question him?

[MannyGoldstein]

4. The President says he's choice #4.

Obama: ‘I Would Be Considered a Moderate Republican’ in the 1980s"

I'd quibble a bit - seems like more of an early 1990s Republican to me - but why would anyone not fundamentally believe him?

[kenny blankenship]

6. If only he had been that honest in 2008.

[Warren Stupidity]

8. I was never confused about this.

He made it quite clear in 2008 that he was center-right. He was running against a doofus and a lunatic and a party that had moved to the far right.

[kenny blankenship]

10. Ok fine. If only he had chosen to be honest about himself in 2007.

[Douglas Carpenter]

37. I personally interpreted his 2004 national debut speech at The Democratic National Convention

"No Red States - No Blue States - Just the United States" as an obvious endorsement of centrism. I Never for a second imagined he was anything other than a centrist. But I could say that for any of the leading contenders for the Democratic Party nomination over the past 30 years.

[DJ13]

30. He was running against a doofus and a lunatic

Oh come on, Hillary and Kucinich werent that bad.

[Warren Stupidity]

31. !

That would have been against an equivalent centrist and an actual democrat with elven features.

[DJ13]

32. Thars why I said they werent that bad

[joshcryer]

44. Clinton ran politically left of Obama.

Though she probably was center-right she was left of Obama.

In 2016 she will be far left of 2008 Obama.

[joshcryer]

43. While this is correct, I think he personally is center-left.

Politically, center-right.

[Warren Stupidity]

47. That is such a relief to know.

At least his heart is in the right place.

[joshcryer]

48. I know Obama is intellectually center-left.

I think he has had to be center-right or centrist because he is black. He can't have the perception as the "angry black man" so he fights that perception.

[deutsey]

16. +1

[cali]

5. I honestly don't know.

I guess I think he's pretty much- for whatever reasons- someone who favors advancing the corporate agenda, and by that I mean he advance corporate interests. I see him as someone who wants the middle class to do well and wants to see those in poverty lifted out of it, but who largely goes along with the corporate agenda. Yes, he wants the minimum wage raised and that's good, but it's not even close to being enough. Like too many dems, he's good on social justice issues like LGBT rights, but I don't see how one can separate economic justice from social justice.

I think the evidence for his corporate enabling can be seen in a myriad issues- from appointments like those at the USTR to his support for expanding fracking with few safeguards- he voted for the horrible bush energy act which included the even more horrible Halliburton loophole for energy producers.

[TheKentuckian]

7. Other: I think he is a technocratic administrator type who is moderately conservative

in a pre - Teabagger era sense.

I believe if Republicans were both more tolerant racially and more diverse geographically that he would have had a choice of parties that he could be on the edge of. Might still have been if he had come up and been in his prime in the 70's if he tacked east instead of Chicago.

You don't get left anything with a cabinet full of Rubinites and out Republicans. The cabinets show the heading.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. He's a "pragmatic", "savvy", centrist politican who is willing to be Not as Bad to be president.

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice. Thomas Paine

[jazzimov]

11. Pushed Lily Ledbetter Act, CARD Act, the ACA, etc

ended DADT, proclaimed that DOMA is unconstitutional.....

sounds pretty Progressive to me!

[cui bono]

29. Not when you add appointed Wall Street execs into the WH, Monsanto execs to the EPA,

didn't give single-payer a seat at the table but had secret back room deals with insurance companies, left many, many Bush appointees in place that are usually switched out by incoming presidents, expanded spying on American citizens and pushed to legalize what was once illegal, prosecutes more whistle blowers than any previous president, rather than renegotiate NAFTA as he promised to do signed a new free trade agreement with Korea, pushing for TPP and tried to keep it from the public, hasn't said no to the KXL pipeline.

Doesn't sound progressive at all now.

[Shandris]

12. I think anyone who thinks the President is center-RIGHT under the modern definitions...

...needs to come live in Indiana for a while and get a first-hand look at what 'Right' looks like.

[Douglas Carpenter]

41. I know what you mean - a few minutes in a local bar where I live would certainly expose anyone to

how much the extreme right has become mainstream. But, I think it is more a statement of how far the range of discussion has drifted rightward when what would have only a few decades ago been considered moderately conservative can now with a straight face be denounced as radical leftist.

[mmonk]

13. Anyone who views Ronald Reagan in positive political terms is conservative.

That being said, I appreciate Obamacare while it lasts even though it was the Heritage plan (better than nothing).

[Marr]

15. Big Business, Moderate Republican by nature-- but he's a professional, Third Way-type politician.

He knows which label he's officially running under, and he knows how to use social issues as liberal bona fides. Social issues generally don't cost big business a dime.

[deutsey]

17. The right has been so effective in negating the left

and moving the center rightward, that most people today don't know what any of these terms really mean anymore.

[OilemFirchen]

18. Other: Post-Sixties Liberal.

Comports with the modern Democratic Party platform, including (off the top of my head):

• Long-established progressive domestic social policy.
  
• Recognition of and participation in the global economy.
  
• Peace through strength and global (including domestic) demilitarization.
  
• Strong UN and NATO participation.
  
• Traditional approaches to lower taxes.
  
• Lowered focus on inflation and deficits.
  

[flamingdem]

19. Obama has reduced the deficit

quite a bit.

Your post has some merit because you recognize these factors. Many here are really spewing the usual garbage that passes for analysis.

[OilemFirchen]

23. He has, indeed.

The deep recession panicked the country, thus mandating deficit cuts and an attempt at debt reduction. Otherwise, I believe him to be a Keynesian. Under ordinary recessionary circumstances it's likely he would have possessed the political capital to pass a huge stimulus, but he inherited a shit pile of FUD. Hey may yet have that opportunity.

[flamingdem]

24. Agree, but not very optimistic about a huge stimulus

but hey I never thought he could get elected in the US of A!

[OilemFirchen]

26. It's doubtful, given the odds for this year's election...

but stranger things have happened during his tenure.

After all, who would have expected the country to be within a few points of full employment so quickly?

[Zorra]

20. I believe this quote sums up the President's ideology pretty accurately

Last edited Sat Mar 29, 2014, 09:44 PM - Edit history (1)

"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." ~ Barack Obama

Obviously, the country was not ready for the different path that that Reagan put us on. The racist, misogynist, homophobic actor/sociopath led America down the garden path, and destroyed the country, and we have not even come close to being recovered from the destruction of the Reagan era to this day.

The dirty fucking hippies were right; Reagan was definitely not.

[2banon]

21. variant shades of gray between Center Right and Serving Wall Street

I think the President serves only the interest of Wall Street and corporate power and has no real political philosophy

and

I think the President is moderately center-right like what would have once been a moderate Republican and attempts to advance that agenda as much as is politically feasible.

I voted he's about Wall Street and Corporate power, and I'd say with little to no regard to political philosophy..


Editing to add: along with too many Congress Critters (D/R), confirmed by this report:

The Economic Scam of the Century

[woo me with science]

22. He is carrying water for very dangerous corporatists.

"Moderate" does not describe the worst decisions of this administration. We have seen an extension and expansion of Bush's most extremist and anti-Constitutional policies. And this is not about Obama the man. This is about the corruption by corporate money of our democratic system, from the billions needed for elections, to lobbying, to the revolving door to Wall Street that corrupts everyday governance. Very little coming out of Washington anymore bears even a slight resemblance to what the people have repeatedly proclaimed we want and need. After Obama's term, if We the People do not find a way to throw ourselves into the gears of the system that is eating us alive, another corporate puppet will be installed.

The ones who now purchase our elections and give us two corporate candidates to choose from have infiltrated and taken control of both political parties. They have trampled the Constitution. They have turned the United States of America into a surveillance state, militarized our police forces, and created a nascent police state. They persecute whistleblowers and criminalize dissent. They strangle investigative journalism and create a propaganda machine to take its place. They are subverting our democratic, representative government and our Constitution to serve the interests of the wealthy elite, and they are working to turn the rest of us into wage slaves. They are profiting from bloody, undeclared wars; surveillance systems; private prisons; exploitative control of our health care and education; and privatization of every resource we have.

And they are now pushing for a trans-national "free trade" agreement that will force Americans to compete with Third World workers for jobs and wages, and cede national sovereignty on issues as important as wages and corporate regulation to corporations that view only profit, not human safety or well-being, as the bottom line.

They are a menace to our representative government, our Constitution, and our freedom. Pretending that they are part of the normal representative governmental process, merely "centrists," is to vastly euphemize the cancer they really are.

No, we are not making incremental progress. We are moving relentlessly in the wrong direction.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4712258

The record shows aggressive, proactive pursuit of a corporate agenda
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023994720#post35

[flamingdem]

25. Majority voting think a man like Obama, with his background

= Reagan.

Once again a DU fail, but don't forget to pat yourselves on the back!

[justabob]

33. so Obama failed at describing himself?

This place has gone completely insane. Obama used almost the exact same words used in option 4 to describe himself, and still you say the rest of us "fail" by agreeing with him.... We are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

[Douglas Carpenter]

35. Yeah, I frankly don't think President Obama was lying at all when he described himself politically

When the President bragged to Bill O'Reilly that Richard Nixon was more liberal than him in many ways - I don't think he was lying about that either. Of course that would also be true of any of the leading contenders for the Democratic Party nomination for the past 20+ years.

[justabob]

40. right

and I agree about the most recent democratic candidates too. I voted for him because he wasn't as bad as the other guy, not because I believed he was a champion of the brand of economic populism I favor. Now someone will probably take offense at that even though I voted for him... twice.

[cthulu2016]

39. Well, you either don't know what majority means or don't know who Reagan was

[GiveMeMorePIE]

28. I picked '3' because it was closest to my subjective interpretation of him.

I do feel he has set the standard for what I will expect from Democratic politicians in the 21st Century.

He strikes the right balance between ideologue and pragmatic and as someone not particularly ideological myself, I thirst for more leaders like this.

[Rex]

34. Ouch.

Those results!

[AverageJoe90]

38. Well, for that, I look at where the evidence point.

As for his economic policy.....it may indeed be admitted that he leans slightly to the right in philosophy; he's not exactly a populist, unlike the good Senator Liz Warren. He is, however, undeniably a civic progressive in many ways. And that's much of why Teabaggers hate him so much.

[Douglas Carpenter]

42. knr

[Spider Jerusalem]

45. To the right of Richard Nixon.

He looks liberal with comparison to the current Republican Party, most of whom have moved over into John Birch Society territory (Barry Goldwater was considered "far right" at one time; he'd be a moderate in today's political environment).

[nomorenomore08]

46. Center-right or center-left, depending on the issue. So basically about as middle of the road

as a person can realistically get. And though I like the guy on a personal level, I can't help but see his lukewarm politics as part of the problem.