Barack Obama, the Moderate Conservative

In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be considered center-right.

This was first made clear to me by Andrew Sullivan, on the Colbert Report and in his blog, and it's undeniably true. Obama shepherded through Congress a health-care law modeled on Mitt Romney's, which incorporates many elements originally recommended by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Obamacare works with private insurers and other existing health care delivery systems and relies on free-market incentives to reduce health care costs—an element of the law that is already working.

Obama is pro business, and pro tax cuts. He lectures African-Americans on personal responsibility. He has allowed Bush-era surveillance and anti-terrorism methods to stand (earning the ire of libertarians and many on the left), and ramped up the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, leading to his killing. He has agreed to unprecedented cuts to the federal budget in an effort to appease hard-liners in the Republican party. The number of public employees under his administration has shrunk, largely due to cuts in federal money for the states. Federal spending is flat since 2009, and has decreased as a percentage of GDP.

Obama is in every rational sense a centrist, and is best understood as taking a center-right stand on most matters of public policy. He is, as Sullivan states, "America's Tory President." Yet the right hates, fears and distrusts him, seeing him as some kind of closet socialist dictator. How can this be?

I think it's useful to make a comparison with Richard Nixon. Nixon was elected a Republican president in an era when liberalism was at its apex, and calls for radical social and political change came most vehemently from the left. In response, Nixon acted in a way that was essentially center-left, supporting the Clean Air Act and the EPA and pushing myriad big-government policies during his tenure. Had he been president today, he would be seen as more liberal than Obama or Bill Clinton. Yet the left of the late '60s and early '70s did not see it this way. To them, he was a right-wing warmonger, a fraud and a disaster for the nation (all this years before Watergate).

Nixon tacked left in reaction to the winds of his time. Obama has tacked right in reaction to the winds of his. Today's right, like yesterday's left, just doesn't see it. In years to come, when Tea Party hysteria dies down, I am certain this will be accepted fact, and I pledge to point it out to my Republican friends ad nauseum.