Politics
Candidate Obama vs. President Obama
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
March 19, 2009
 |
| (AP) |
In September 2008, during the first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, McCain said his Democratic opponent had “the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate — it’s hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left.”
Obama rejected the charge. “This is all old politics,” he said in February 2008. “Those old categories don’t work, and they’re preventing us from solving the problems that the American people want us to solve.”
From that, the image of Obama as a centrist, pragmatic problem-solver was born. It was an image that would last through the campaign, and through the election, and all the way until Inauguration Day.
But now, after nearly two months of the Obama administration, more and more voters are wondering: Is the Barack Obama they voted for the same Barack Obama who now occupies the Oval Office?
Early signs — Obama’s support of the $787 billion stimulus bill, his $3.6 trillion budget proposal, his tax proposals, his health care proposals, his environmental proposals, his flexibility on earmarks — suggest that Obama does, in fact, fit into those “old categories” he once rejected.
Obama is pursuing a traditional liberal agenda. If he continues to walk that path, the question will become why anyone ever believed he would do otherwise.
Well, for one, he was a great candidate, and McCain was not. Beyond that, though, Obama was what political strategists call an “aspirational candidate.” He represented something that voters aspired to be: Part of an America that was good enough, and far enough removed from its racial past, to elect a strong candidate who was also an African-American.
The feeling touched liberals and conservatives alike. On the right, conservatives who opposed Obama still expressed happiness that he was a serious contender. A few went beyond that, giving rise to the much-discussed “Obamacon” phenomenon.
“Having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will surely understand that traditional-left politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves,” wrote Christopher Buckley, son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, when he endorsed Obama in October.
Just a few weeks of the Obama administration caused Buckley to wonder if he had judged Obama correctly. Another admirer, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, wrote this month of having been forced “to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was.”
They’re not alone. Right now, Americans who feel a creeping sense of buyer’s remorse about Obama are still in the minority; his job approval rating is still high, and his personal approval rating is higher.
But Obama knows what might come. Back in early 2008, when he found himself in trouble over his 20-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama said plaintively, “I may not know him as well as I thought.” Now, Obama’s fear is that voters might be thinking the same thing.
byork@dcexaminer.com
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