Sunday, March 14, 2010

Defining The Moderate Center - David Brooks on Obama

I think David Brooks gets it totally right, on the Presidents agenda and instincts in his column,

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The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.


That is a great way not only to define the President, but as a vision of governance that is both forward looking and sensible.

As Brooks notes that is hard.


He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.

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