Something is annoying me

[anvi]

I think Antonio is on to something with regard to what is annoying you, Simfan24, but I'd put it a little differently.

Clinton wasn't a left-winger.  He helped found the DLC and then in his first presidential campaign dragged the Dems kicking and screaming to the center.  He "triangulated" on purpose.  He did get beat a few times, but this strategy was, particularly after Congress changed hands in '94, pretty successful; it got him reelected and produced lots of legislation he was able to pass. 

Obama has never been a left-winger either; he has always been mostly a centrist-reformer type, but more a conciliator than someone with his own legislative agenda.  Now, the GOP does not want to get hooked by the triangulation strategy again.  So, we get this dance where, with policies which you rightly note are fundamentally of GOP invention, when Obama moves one step toward them, the Pubbies move two steps right, and if Obama moves two steps toward them, the Pubbies move four steps right.  It all ends up being a pretty ugly dance in terms of crafting good legislation.  But, in terms of election politics, it does something for the GOP, it highlights differences that feed into a polarization narrative, and that gives something for people to choose between when they go to the polls.

The last real left-winger president was LBJ.  In terms of fiscal and government policy (not necessarily social policy), the "center" of U.S. politics has been moving steadily right ever since.

[anvi]

Ghost_white,

One of the things that explains the consistently high levels of spending on entitlements from the end of LBJ's term to now is the composition of Congress.  The House of Representatives was controlled by Democrats from 1969-1995, and therefore the Republican presidents who were in office at the time couldn't have made drastic cuts into entitlement spending even if they had wanted to (and I doubt Nixon or Ford did want to do much of this).  Bush 41 wowed to protect social security and based more of his first campaign on tax cuts than on entitlement cuts.  Clinton never advocated returning tax rates to pre-Reagan levels, but instead changed them only modestly.  Bush 43 emphasized tax cuts and not entitlement spending, like his father, even when he had a slim majority in Congress from 2001-2006, and Medicare part-D was a big linchpin in his reelection strategy (even Tom Coburn attests to this).  So, when I say the fiscal policy of the country has been moving steadily right since LBJ, I don't mean that it has been a drastic or sudden shift, but that the ball has moved right first on taxation levels and presently on entitlement cuts ever since LBJ's term.

[anvi]

I don't consider the fiscal policy of the right to be fundamentally about entitlements, debt or smaller government.  It wasn't too long ago that Cheney is alleged to have said: "deficits don't matter" and Bush was actually touting "compassionate conservatism."  What I consider the fiscal policy of the "right" to be essentially about is marginal tax rates; it was 30 years ago, and it is now.  Most of the push of the right for a long time consisted overtly of changes in marginal tax rates for the wealthy and for businesses.  Those rates dropped a great deal during Reagan's terms, ticked up only very slightly under Bush 41, went up slightly more under Clinton, and then drooped again under Bush.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=213

http://visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/03/nytimes-historical-tax-rates-by-income-group/

So, even through the "size" of government or cutting entitlement spending have certainly not, as you correctly note, always been an explicit or emphasized agenda item for Republicans in the last forty years, particularly in the legislative practice, they have been made so now by the persistent GOP tax-cutting agenda.   The demand for entitlement cuts right now is fundamentally driven by the tax issue, since deficits have grown so large and so much of the government budget is devoted to them, they cannot be maintained at levels resembling those available now unless we raise taxes again or continue piling up debt.  The point is that it is the tax-cutting agenda, which has been the major priority of the right in the last several decades, that has driven fiscal policy slowly but surely further right.  The fact that we're arguing now over 39% levels for the top bracket instead of 35% levels, rather than arguing over 70% levels rather than 50% levels, strikes me as evidence of the tax-cutting agenda's success over recent decades.  And, at this precise moment, a Democratic president is trying to secure deeper spending cuts, three times as much, over the next ten years than the GOP House so long as they let him push the top bracket up 4% over the course of the next ten years, and, lo and behold, the Republicans won't agree.  "Righty" fiscal policy is about tax rates.