Reagan embraced the label "conservative," Obama rejects the label "liberal"

So how can he be a transformational candidate, in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and Reagan (who was transformational in the wrong direction?)

We have never had a tranformational President who wanted to reach out to the opposition party.

Senator Obama does not seem to understand the history of our country.

In order to be transformational, you have to be a committed ideologue, highly partisan and aggressively agenda driven.

If you won't even embrace your progressive credentials, and your entire message is one of unity and bipartisanship, you are seeking to be a triangulator, a co-opting President along the lines of Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Barack and Obama and Bill Clinton are kindred spirits in that regard.

Senator Clinton is very different from her husband both in temperament and style. She does not believe in accommodating the ideas of the opposing party. She believes in fighting against them.

The candidate with the potential to be the transformational President in this race, the one who is committed to a progressive agenda, who is both partisan and highly ideological, in the grand historical tradition of real change agents, is Hillary Clinton.

That sentence is quite untrue, as evidenced by her early (and late) support for this Republican war.

I'm not an Obama supporter so I don't feel required to defend his funding of the war.

the Senate and House were given false info. by our Pres. and his minions

I am sick and tired of Democratic politicians rejecting the liberal label, and thus liberalsm itself. To me, Obama is WAY to the right of Hillary, so perhaps he's just being honest; he's no liberal.

labels themselves.

that is the epitome of the co-opting style of leadership.

Transformers have always been highly partisan, even divisive.

wear are one of the ways that we remain divided. The labels are essentially phony and by subscribing to their validity we partition ourselves. I suspect Obama has arrived at that conclusion.

I make my own decisions thank you!

This is another point where Obama's DLC colors are on full display to anyone paying attention.

Reagan wasn't a "conservative", by the standards of the day. He forged a new consensus about what conservatism is, a consensus that has proven disastrously effective over the past few decades.

Just judging by the calendar, we're about due for one (they happen every 30-40 years or so). Obama's strategy seems to be a reorientation in which religious voters vote for the poor rather than against women and gays (remember, the evangelicals supported Carter before Reagan came along; this is not an impossible idea). Will there be shake-ups? Yes, we'll be a bigger tent that will include some people we don't see eye to eye with on everything. We'll probably have to give up on our political-suicide-method-of-choice, gun control. And the ideological narrative of the party will probably be more blue-collar and more faith-friendly.

Appealing to "values voters" isn't about moving to the right: Obama has pretty starkly upbraided several religious groups for anti-gay bigotry. It doesn't make them abandon him. Why? Because he persuasively argues that his acceptance of gays (and his church's acceptance of gays -- THANK YOU UCC!) is a fundamentally righteous and Godly value.

So, if he pulls this off, he will be changing what "liberal" means in the future.

Reagan was the culmination of the movement that started with Barry Goldwater. It was fifteen years in the making. He was aggressively partisan, rigidly "anti-Soviet," hellbent on reversing the "welfare state," and wedded to lowering taxes to cripple "big government."

Richard Nixon and Ford were both cooptors. The conservative wing had been angling to take back the party since 1964.

Reagan didn't redefine conservatism. He ran as a rock solid rightwinger. His timing was lucky, in that the public perceived Carter as weak, but Reagan embraced a very aggressive, very rightwing agenda and created a winning coalition by adding the religious evangelicals.

He didn't redefine anything. He moved the country to the right through the sheer force of committed ideology.

Why, in the name of springtime would you NOT want to bring people over to the LEFT and reorient the political landscape?

You think it's more important to stick to a freaking LABEL?

When that label is an emotionally charged word that hatemongers have invested so much bile against?

We want to shift the Center to the LEFT. That is what Obama is doing.

The DLC/Clinton Machine is content having the country split in half so nothing gets done and the corporate elite can continue fleecing us.

I always ask them why they don't want to be called Liberals. I have been told on several occasions that Liberal represents the failures of the boomers/Democrats.

My follow up question has therefore become - Do you consider yourself a Democrat? All but one "Progressive" has told me no - they are independent.

My next question has become - Do you see the emergence of a new party - The Progressive Party. The answer is always NO! - We will remain in the Democratic Party.

Who are these people?

A conservative is someone who wants to conserve something. They're quite pleased with this label, so let them have it.

The flip side of this, in my mind, is to make progress (i.e. expanded rights for people, more protection for the environment, and so forth). If what's going on isn't worth conserving, it's worth improving instead. A progressive wants these things, and so that's why I'm progressive.

On the other hand, the word "liberal" implies a certain recklessness to me. A casino with "liberal" slot machines suggests I should go there, because the payouts are higher than they should be. A pizza place with "liberal" cheese and toppings suggests that they somehow give me more than they should. Neither of those may actually be true, but the word "liberal" just rings false to me. I don't like it, and I don't use it to describe myself or my beliefs.

His "reaching out" to the most anti-democratic factions of a party that needs to be quashed (not the whole R party, but the most rabid factions) is one of my main "this does not compute" issues with Obama.

Also up there: His admiration of Reagan, his dissing the "excesses of the 1960s" (especially without making any distinction among those "excesses"), his commitment to unfettered capitalism/free trade/globalization, and his belief that a society cannot "cohere" if we do not maintain the status quo of "constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order" (The Audacity of Hope, pp. 86-87*).

If he's rejected the "liberal" label, it comes as no surprise -- he's just not that liberal.

I'm not trying to make this an Obama-bashing post -- I just can't understand how Obama is labeled a "liberal" when his positions are so not liberal.

Turning to Hillary: "In order to be transformational, you have to be a committed ideologue, highly partisan and aggressively agenda driven." Amen to that. Hillary isn't my idea of a liberal either, but in this regard alone, I have far more confidence in her ability, and her dogged determination, not to roll over and play dead like her many spineless and ineffectual Congressional colleagues -- thus making her the only truly transformational agent of change.


* "The founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order...how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?"

I reckon the progressive/liberal perception has something to do with age.

Without ragging on the young folks (really, I'm not), it's hard to ignore the frequency of the pro-Obama argument: "I've never had a JFK in my life!" -- when in truth, JFK wasn't the JFK of myth. (Bobby was a lot closer, but that's beside the point.)

I'm guessing that if a person hasn't lived through times when real "radical lefties" were out there really scaring the crap out of Middle America (e.g., Angela Davis, the Chicago Seven), then Obama, by comparison to the Clintons, must appear like something new.

In reality, he's nothing new. Or even a "lefty."

It's easier for them to control us if we fit neatly into their little categories. That way then can blow off entire movements just by mentioning the word "liberal". That is usually the death knell of any democratic campaign. I suspect that as soon as we get people to look at politics outside of the little boxes the media has created for us those people will realize that liberal issues are mainstream. The obliteration of those divisions is the central theme of the Obama campaign.

That's significantly better than Hillary who keeps pushing her conservative credentials!

People want substantive change. HRC offers that. BHO offers nothing like that.

In most of the world (outside of the USA, Canada and the UK), "liberal" (or "neo-liberal") = right-wing.

nomination,a republican will beat obambi by using the word, liberal, liberal, liberal over and over..as per karl rove..
Then again we will not have to concern ourselves about that since obambi will not be the nominee...

Amazing how you set up a standard for others, that you don't yourself support.

really intellectually dishonest of you. But I am no longer surprised as to what passes for an argument anymore.