Barack Obama, False Moderate

[308Mike]

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October 24, 2008 12:00 AM

Barack Obama, False Moderate
His centrism is a pose.

By Rich Lowry

The only two Democrats who have won in the past 10 presidential elections were moderates from the South.

This datum made the nomination of Barack Obama — a liberal from the South Side, not the South — seem an unnecessary gamble for Democrats. At least before it became evident how convincing an imitation Obama could do of his moderate Democratic forebears.

Obama’s campaign has some of the trappings of Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 and 1996 campaigns. Obama is like Clinton in 1992 in that he’s running against a deeply unpopular incumbent president (although George W. Bush isn’t on the ballot) and brandishing a middle-class tax cut. He’s like Clinton in 1996 in that he’s burying an older opponent in an avalanche of paid advertising, while branding himself a centrist.

Clinton had earned the right in 1992 to run as a “new kind of Democrat” by confronting liberal interest groups in the primaries. Obama simply showed up the day after he won the nomination and declared himself a centrist. Everything since has been couched in reassuring, moderate terms in brilliant salesmanship worthy of the best minds at the American Marketing Association.