President Obama, Moderate Conservative?

You guys know Ed, right?

He blogs over at Cognitive Dissonance and he's doing a stand up job every week (far more than I am at this point, by the way) at countering Jack Kelly's conservative drivel over at the P-G. If you're not reading his blog, you should. It's pretty darn good. The bastard.

Anyhoo, he sent me a link to Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman linking to Regan economic advisor Bruce Bartlett who's asserting:

Liberals hoped that Obama would overturn conservative policies and launch a new era of government activism. Although Republicans routinely accuse him of being a socialist, an honest examination of his presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal.

The rest of Bartlett's piece is evidence of Obama's non-Liberalness for example:

• His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary;
• He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary;
• He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals;
• He caved to conservative demands that the Bush tax cuts be extended without getting any quid pro quo whatsoever;
• And in the past few weeks he has supported deficit reductions that go far beyond those offered by Republicans.

And so on. Not sure I buy the whole argument but perhaps my political paradigm requires some shifting. If anything this shows that we live in a political universe that's profoundly relativistic.

There's no absolute space, no absolute rest. Everything is moving relative to everything else and what it means to be "liberal" or "conservative" has to be viewed through the relative frame of reference of the person using each term.