A Nation of Lefties

I've seen a lot of writing over the last two days about how Obama needs to be careful as he moves ahead with his presidency because he's so liberal and the country is fundamentally conservative. I've seen and heard the phrase "center-right nation" more times than I can count. Newsweek, always on the lookout for a scoop, printed a cover story a few weeks ago declaring, America the Conservative. (That hasn't stopped them from running at least two major stories on the end of conservativism in the last year, though.) Here's my issue: I don't know how true this talk is.

We heard throughout the entire campaign that Obama was the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. We heard that he was the most liberal candidate ever nominated in our nation's history. Over the last two weeks or so we heard he was a wealth spreading, redistributionist, socialist. The word was out on this guy. He's a lefty. I think he even writes with his left hand.

So if we have a candidate who everyone knows is a liberal and he's elected by a huge electoral margin and a decent sized popular margin and Democrats gain seats in both the House and Senate and Democrats acrss the country do so well, how center-right are we really?

I agree with the idea that we are not a nation of radicals. We don't favor huge revolutionary changes. But this kind of tempermental conservativism is very different from political conservativism. Tempermentally I agree that we as a nation favor gradual changes. However, I think history has shown us that we tend to favor those changes in a progressive, left-leaning direction. That's why we have a progressive income tax, Social Security, the FDIC, civil rights legislation, and more.

I guess we'll find out for sure what Americans think when President Obama starts implementing his policy agenda. All I'm saying is that when the left wins everything it's hard to say that we're a right leaning nation.

McCain's Maverick Myth

I've been saying for months now that John McCain's image as a maverick independent is a completely overblown media creation. I've been saying that he's actually quite conservative and nowhere near the center of the road. It's good to be right.

I figured that as the campaign went on, someone would get the bright idea to actually take a look at the facts behind the legend of the Straight Talk Express. I didn't really expect it to come from the Arizona Republic - a paper not known for taking shots at Republicans - but there it was in yesterday's paper. (In all reality, the paper was probably trying to reassure Arizona voters that John McCain really was conservative so they wouldn't feel bad about voting for him.)

The Republic looked at John McCain's voting record over the last 1o years to see how often he actually bucked the party on issues where it mattered because the vote was close. The answer: not often. In the last 10 years, McCain voted with Republicans 14 times when the vote was tied or settled by one vote. He voted with Democrats a mere 4 times during that stretch, including once when Dick Cheney could have cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Republicans.

Casting a vote on the Democratic side once every two and a half years hardly makes someone a maverick. And the facts go on.

The article says that the Washington Post found that McCain voted with Republicans 88.3% of the time this term. That puts him on par with Lindsey Graham and ahead of Jon Kyl, who's the Minority Whip. McCain is truer to the Republican Party than party leadership is!

Furthermore, Congressional Quarterly found that during the last term McCain sided with the president's position on legislation 95% of the time. To get any more in line with the president you'd pretty much have to be George Bush.

Also, not to beat a deadhorse, but if there was ever a time for a maverick to break with the president, it would make sense to do it when the president's disapproval ratings were at an all-time historical high.

In sum, McCain is a much weaker candidate than he appears. For all the talk about how flawed it turns out the Democrats are, McCain has fully aligned himself with a failed presidency and out of step party. Pretty soon, the news of the maverick gap is going to spread beyond his hometown paper and the word will be out. Then we'll see how straight talking McCain is really willing to be.

Progressive Takeover

Kind of a strange thing has happened and I haven't been seeing a lot of notice about it. Somewhere along the line, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party took over. Not only have they taken the party, but they've taken a pretty good chunk of America too. So brilliant has this takeover been, that the ideas they espouse are pretty much just mainstream ideas for an awfully big chunk of the country.

What got me thinking about this is a recent article in The Nation team-written by Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Danny Glover, and Barbara Ehrenreich. The article says that progressives should vote for Obama in this election because he's the one who has the best chance of getting a progressive agenda enacted.

Note, they did not say that he is the candidate with the most progressive agenda. They said he's the one most likely to get it done. We've been hearing for months that there's very little in the way of policy differences between Clinton and Obama. That's not because both of them are so moderate. It's because they've both staked out such progressive opinions.

Compare this state of affairs to the election even four years ago. Can you imagine in 2004 two candidates arguing over who would pull the most troops out of Iraq fastest? Can you imagine two candidates debating which universal health care system is best? The general policy assumptions are agreed upon - we need to leave Iraq, the government should create a universal health care system - now the debate (like the devil) is in the details. What a stunning transformation in such a short time frame.

The other development we're seeing is that one-time liberal ideas are just ideas now. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal funding of education, increased attention to the environment. The list goes on. Each item on it was once considered the domain of the far left. Now they're just assumed to be platform pillars in both parties - even the Republicans.

Now, obviously some progressive ideas are more progressive than others. John McCain's vision is still strikingly different from Barack Obama's. But you've gotta admit, the general trend here is encouraging.

Is McCain Right?

The answer to the above question depends on what you mean by right. If you mean the sense of correct in his worldview and proposed actions, the answer is no. If you mean conservative, the answer is resoundingly yes, despite the bloviating of Rush Limbaugh et al.

Let's take just two examples of McCain's supposed liberal leanings: voting against the Bush tax cuts and immigration reform.

First, voting against the tax cuts was actually a pretty conservative thing to do if we assume that conservatives are the ones who want to be fiscally responsible and limit the size of government. The reason for his no vote was not that he doesn't think rich people should be allowed to keep more money, but rather that it didn't make sense to cut taxes without correspondingly cutting spending as this would require running a deficit. (This should be a familiar idea for anyone who's read Barry Goldwater's Consience of a Conservative.) Since Bush was actually increasing spending at the same time he was cutting revenue, the "conservative" thing to do was vote no on the cuts. In that sense, McCain was more conservative than our darling president.

Second, the immigration reform debate has been hijacked by morons and nut jobs so any labeling of liberal and conservative on the issue is pretty skewed. The Republican party seems to have taken on the general consensus that illegal immigrants (all 12 million of them) should be rounded up and deported. No one has yet produced a plan for how we should go about doing that because, well, it's probably impossible. Anyone who says otherwise is operating in a realm outside of reality. So McCain takes the position that we've got millions of people in this country, many of whom are contributing to society, and we should work with what we've got rather than chase pie in the sky notions of Old West-style roundups. He's not proposing amnesty or opening the borders to the poor, huddled masses. He's just not giving into hysteria. His position isn't liberal so much as sane.

(On a related note, The New York Times reported today that maybe the immigration situation isn't as out of control as we've been led to believe.)

The point I'm getting at here is that even with the issues on which he's being called liberal, John McCain is still taking on conservative positions. That doesn't even touch on the issues like abortion rights or war in the Middle East in which even the far right wing has to see a kindred spirit. There's no doubt that McCain is running in the primary in which he belongs. He isn't liberal and he isn't even really that much of a maverick.