Is Obama a Liberal or Moderate?

[Indy Texas]

Economic Policy - more liberal than Clinton and Carter; less liberal than LBJ

Foreign Policy - a realist in the George H. W. Bush mold; he doesn't seem to have any major foreign policy aspirations in the sense that LBJ and Dubya did; he's more hesitant to intervene in external conflicts (Libya, Syria) than Bill Clinton was (Bosnia)

I don't think it's very helpful to make relative judgments about social policy since so many of the issues concerned are contemporary. (If you opposed integration in the 1950s, you'd be considered a conservative; if you opposed integration in the 2010s, you'd be so far off the map I wouldn't know what to do with you.) Obama's "evolving" stance on gay marriage could be viewed as opportunistic and self-serving, and in that sense he wouldn't be unlike Jimmy Carter, who was incredibly two-faced regarding racial issues during his time in Georgia state politics.

[Indy Texas]

I'd really dispute the claim that Obama is more to the left, economically, than Clinton, let alone Carter. Taxes are lower than they were under Clinton, and it's Obama's policy that they should stay that way. Obama care is more market-oriented than Hillarycare was, and is derived fairly explicitly from the kind of ideas that the Heritage Foundation liked in the '90s, as a way of forestalling a genuinely leftist set of reforms.

Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter both left economic deregulation as their chief economic accomplishments. Clinton deregulated the financial industry; Carter deregulated airlines and trucking. Obama has enacted more new federal regulations than any president since Nixon.

Obama wants higher taxes on the wealthy; Clinton has publicly disagreed.

And Carter did not support any attempt at universal healthcare as president. He did not believe people had a "right" to healthcare. Nixon was more of a liberal on healthcare than Carter.