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The
Hill
Obama gives no
hint if he will lean to center or left during second term
By Niall Stanage and Amie Parnes
11/15/12
Saying, “I didn’t get reelected to bask in reelection. I got elected to
do work,” President Obama on Wednesday set out his stall for the first
months of his second term.
But he gave no clear hint about whether he would tack to the left or to
the center now that he has run his last election campaign.
On several big issues, including the fiscal cliff, immigration reform
and climate change, the president’s comments at his first press
conference since winning a second term in the Oval Office contained
enough to buttress arguments both of those who say he is a reflexive
left-winger and those who say, rather, that he is a pragmatic
deal-maker.
On all the biggest issues of the day, he suggested that there was a
path to bipartisan agreement, but he simultaneously framed each topic
so as to showcase his commitment to Democratic priorities: upping tax
rates on those earning more than $250,000 a year, providing “a pathway
for legal status” for illegal immigrants and doing more to reduce
carbon emissions.
The White House news conference, therefore, did nothing to resolve one
of the central debates that has always swirled around him.
Is he a committed liberal who had to trim his sails because the 2012
election loomed? Or is he in fact a centrist uncomfortable with what
his erstwhile spokesman Robert Gibbs once derided as “the professional
left”?
In general, it has been those on the right who have seen him as a
radical, and those on the left who have been suspicious of the
accommodationist tendencies they claim to discern.
The divergence was often apparent in the way particular issues were
viewed. Conservatives, united in their distaste for the Affordable Care
Act, insisted that it represented a massive governmental overreach. But
there were plenty of people on the left who believed it did not go far
enough toward a single-payer system.
Some of Obama’s closest backers insist that it is too crude to see him
as a liberal or centrist, per se.
A former senior administration official said Obama shouldn’t be labeled
under either category.
“I don’t think he would characterize himself in either way,” the former
official said. “I think he would say that the American people sent him
to deal with big problems and you can call him whatever you want but
he’s more concerned with addressing these big issues.”
The official added the argument that Obama was “pretty pragmatic” in
his first term.
“Ask liberals what they thought and ask conservatives and everyone will
have their own axes to grind,” the official said. “When you have both
sides saying that, I’d argue he’s being pragmatic.”
Several outside observers amplified this point. Princeton Professor
Julian Zelizer asserted that Obama subscribes to the standard
Democratic view on most big issues, but knows that he needs to accept
some give-and-take as the price of getting things done.
Read the rest of the article at The Hill
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