Daily Kos:Once more with feeling: Obama has not governed from the "left"

The amazing thing is.... I think they really believe this crap!

from: Daily Kos

Greg Sargent continues to bring up the key false narrative being pushed in reaction to Bill Daley's selection for chief of staff--that this is a "correction" in an administration that has governed from the left. He follows up in a great post today, noting that (of course) the Third Way picked up the lie and ran with it in their reaction to Daley's selection.

Maybe it's true that "the left's agenda" has not won the support of a majority of Americans, but that claim has nothing to do with the agenda Obama actually pursued during his first two years.

This is a matter of simple factual reality. Obama and Dems passed a smaller stimulus than many on the left wanted. Obama and Dems jettisoned from health reform the core provision liberals sought, and embraced solutions once championed by Republicans. Wall Street reform was not as ambitious as the left had hoped. The Obama administration has escalated in Afghanistan and justified it with rhetoric that Republicans wholly approve of. Has embraced many Bush policies on civil liberties and terrorism that the left despises.

Obama, in other words, embraced a mix of liberal and Republican solutions to the crises he inherited. While his agenda was undeniably the most ambitious in a generation, the general ideological complexion of his approach can at best be described as governing from the "center left" -- precisely what Daley chastised Obama for allegedly failing to do.

To add a bit on just one of those issues: the health reform bill pushed by the administration, the bill that eventually passed, was modeled primarily on the law Republican Mitt Romney signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts. It contained many elements Republicans had been espousing for years (until it actually came time for a Democratic majority to sheperd the bill), and it was negotiated with every major industry involved. AHIP wasn't just at the table, a former WellPoint VP essentially wrote the bill for Sen. Max Baucus, the bill that ultima...

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