In a well written post, Laurence Lewis argues that President Obama is a Centrist or Conservative but not a Progressive. The money quote is...
This does not mean that President Obama is a Republican[..]. The Republican Party is not conservative, it is extremist. But as the Republican Party has drifted farther and farther to the fringe, much of the establishment Democratic Party has intrepidly moved into the ideological space the Republican Party abandoned. The Republicans lead this movement to the right, and the Democrats follow, taking the political center with them and leaving the traditional left ever more disenfranchised, disenchanted, and politically alienated. The problem with Barack Obama isn't that he is worse than establishment Village Democrats, the problem is that he is one of them. He didn't change Washington, but he is changing what some who consider themselves liberal or progressive are willing to tolerate, accept, and even support.
I differ from Laurence in my interpretation of the facts. IMO, Obama is trying to arrest our longstanding slide into utter kleptocracy...
I think he believes this is the best we/he can do right now, given the f****d up situation of our political system and that if he had wanted to be "truly progressive" then he never would have been able to become the president of the United States of America.
I give him more rope than many progressives, because I think it's hard to judge him without understanding the many unknown factors at work in the actual process of getting elected and leading our country. But I also put more of my hope for change for our countries in Strategic Election Reform.
This reflects a philosophical view that it doesn't matter who gets elected or appointed to the top positions that they all need to accommodate the status quo system of power. Thus, it is more important to push for cultural changes that mediate how power gets wielded. This is more important than who does the wielding of power, regardless of party or political creed.
And, to bring about more political cultural changes, I believe it is more important to decentralize influence rather than power. This is why Strategic Election Reform pushes for the use of 3-seated proportional representation for state representative or city council elections. We do not need to make the system fair to all parties or to give voters the ability to rank their first, second or third place options in an election. We simply need to make it impossible for either major party to dominate any state's politics and to enable Local Third (LT)* parties to make our democracy more dynamic and do a better job in the protection of ethnic/economic/ideological minority rights.
As of right now, our system tilts too easily to effective single party rule and that's probably why Obama's seemingly swinging to the right. He wanted to establish a "permanent majority" for the Democratic party, which would then allow the US politics to start to swing back to the left. But it seems that the unanticipated difficulty with passing Health Care reform, the lagged benefits from Economic growth and the tea-party enthusiasm and progressive lack of enthusiasm, which is due in part to the many problems with the Democratic party establishment, have combined to stymie his and the Democratic party's success in 2010's election.
This is why I believe that in 2012, we need to focus more on the system and specifically (strategic) electoral reform or the use of more winner-doesn't-take-all elections in the US's political system.
Another example of strategic election reform is the use of an instant runoff version of a "top two primary" for statewide elections. This would make the election have two stages. The first stage would be a winner-doesn't-take-all election. Voters would have to choose their "top two" out of five candidates. Each would get two "approval votes" that they would have to give to their two favorite (or two least bad) candidates. Then, the two candidates with the most "approval" votes would advance to the final stage. Here, the rankings given by the voters to their "top two" candidates would be used to determine their first choice among the two finalists. The finalist who is the first choice of the most voters would get elected. This rule would make it hard for an "extremist" candidate to make it to the second round, since their supporters would have to give their second "approval vote" to another candidate and the more moderate candidates' supporters would likely not always reciprocate. Ie, if I were a moderate Republican, I might choose to give my second approval vote to an independent or a moderate Democrat than a Palin/tea-party-supported extremist. This would suffice to keep Sarah Palin-style candidates that appeal strongly to a limited base of the population from becoming governor again.
But how would you choose the five candidates, this and other questions will be dealt with in more detail in other posts. But the point is that we need to both accept Obama's "centrist" leadership and pick our battles with him. The battle worth fighting the most is to call on him to do the right thing and make Strategic Election Reform a central part of his campaign in the next two to six years of presidency.
dlw
*LT parties, my term, are third parties, not unlike Progressive Dane in Wisconsin, that would specialize in contesting only local elections and otherwise vote strategically together as part of their ongoing engagement in civil issue advocacy to move our political center.