Obama government will stop defending the DOMA

[Marokai Backbeat]

I wonder if certain liberals here still think Obama is not liberal enough?

Lol. Obama is barely liberal. I don't understand how you could realistically define him as anything other than a charismatic centrist.

[Marokai Backbeat]

I wonder if certain liberals here still think Obama is not liberal enough?

Lol. Obama is barely liberal. I don't understand how you could realistically define him as anything other than a charismatic centrist.

If National Journal's most liberal Senator in 2007 is not a liberal, then who is a liberal, exactly?

Oh please, even you are smarter than that, Cinyc. Those ratings are silly.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Name one thing Obama has done that's anywhere near centrist. I certainly don't consider his position on the DOMA or gay marriage to be centrist.

Frankly, it certainly is centrist. He neither supports or wants to ban gay marriage, he supports civil unions. That's a clearly centrist position.

But other things? There's a bunch. His healthcare plan was basically the Republican proposal from the 1990's, it borrowed a ton of originally Republican ideas and is far to the right of anything Kennedy, Nixon, Truman, FDR, TR, LBJ, and even to the right of Clinton's old proposal in the 1990's.

His tax cut deal with the Republicans was a complete cave. You think an extension of all Bush tax cuts is something the super-farthest-left President ever agrees to do? Even the tax hikes he wants would merely increase it to Clinton levels.

Financial regulations were extraordinarily basic. In the State of the Union, Obama proposed cutting the corporate tax rate. Last year Obama proposed taking a Republican tax idea on business reinvestment and blowing it up to a 100% deduction instead.

After the Tuscon shooting, Obama did absolutely nothing about gun control. Under Obama, gun rights have probably expanded more than any President in decades. And hell, right now, Obama is in the process of caving to Republican spending cuts, proposing his on spending freezes, and wanting to spend even more in the defense budget.

You could think of a million different things he's done or said that by no means says he's far to the left by any measure.

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You don't know that much about Australia, then.

[Marokai Backbeat]

This effect has been explained before. Democratic nominees for president from the Senate tend to get rated as highly liberal by even objective sources while they are campaigning for the White House because they often take fewer votes due to spending less time in DC and they often only vote when their vote is needed by the party or for highly important legislation. As such, there is a heavy selection bias and the rating, while not biased in an intentionally partisan or ideological way, tends to skew reality toward the extremes; it makes sense that in 2007 or 2008 even while Obama was spending most of his time campaigning that his 'liberal score' would be high.

Scores from 2005 or 2006 should be more reflective of his natural leanings.

Care to guess who had the most liberal Senate voting record of all Democratic nominees in 2006, per National Journal?  Hint.

Why do you people always obsessively focus on the stupid ratings lists instead of actually pointing out the list of the evil liberal things they've said and done instead?

You can talk talk talk about Obama's crazy-liberal record but it's not reflected in almost anything he's actually done.