Obama and The New New Left

When Sen. Barack Obama emerged as a Democratic presidential candidate, a good many people on the center-right cottoned to him. And they mostly still support him. But now some are having second thoughts, because he's actually pretty liberal.

David Brooks on Obama:

His weakness is that he never breaks from his own group. In policy terms, he is an orthodox liberal. He never tells audiences anything that might make them uncomfortable. In the Senate, he didn’t join the Gang of 14, which created a bipartisan consensus on judges, because it would have meant deviating from liberal orthodoxy and coming to the center.

Yet at the same time, commentators and activists on the left are having doubts about Obama's liberal credentials. Paul Krugman's probably the most visible of this camp, but Bob Kuttner's article today in the LA Times summarizes their doubts well:

Barack Obama has positioned himself as the candidate with a great life story who rises above partisan divides. But he has stumbled on the two key pocketbook issues of Social Security and health insurance. Obama bought the much exaggerated story about Social Security's coming insolvency, and proposed payroll tax increases not just on the rich but on the upper middle class as well. His health insurance plan fails to insure everyone. He is capable of talking like a bold progressive, but his senior economic advisers -- University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee and Harvard's David Cutler -- are both economic centrists infatuated with markets.

Both of these smart people can't be right. Or can they? Obama, I think, is perceived so differently because he's attempting a balancing act. He's making subtle gestures to both groups to show he's listening to them, that he's on their side. And recently he's been getting caught.

But Obama is neither the centrist the left sees nor the liberal the centrists see, but an entirely new type of politician that's yet to be categorized- someone who'll bring left, center-left and center-right together in a strong coalition. Unlike the Clinton coalition, it wouldn't be necessary to sell one faction out to gain another, nor would it be necessary to excessively co-opt conservative rhetoric and policy to get elected. Independents and moderates are up for grabs, thanks to Bush and Co., and I think Obama wants to seize the opportunity without losing liberals. Read this Mark Schmitt piece for an even better explanation of this basic idea.

Hopefully, it will all be in the service of transformative liberal policy. Obama has explicitly promised that, but sometimes it feels uncomfortably reasonable to have doubts of a slightly different sort. The entire thing could fall apart if he goes too far one way and not the other. And both the left and the center are on watch.