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It started with Bill Clinton and the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council.
My best guess is that the Reagan and Bush I years pushed this country so far to the right that anything left of Ayn Rand economically and Jerry Falwell socially, wrapped in God, Guns and the Flag, was considered to be practically Marxist/Leninist. Witness all the far right types throwing the accusations of Obama being "Marxist," "Communist," etc. when they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
The DLC quite likely figured they had to "downplay" traditional Democratic issues like health care and workers' rights, and distance themselves from the unions that had got busted during the Reagan-Bush I years to be "electable." Hence, we got "Democrats" like Evan Bayh (I'm originally from Indiana and remember him well as both Governor and Senator...nice guy but had to play it very, very safe in ultraconservative Indiana) and the late Paul Tsongas, not to mention Bill Clinton (whom I voted for twice).
A lot of people lost respect for Clinton when he had his fling with Monica Lewinsky. I lost a great deal of respect for him when he started parrotting Newt Gingrich with the "the era of big government is over" statement. To give him credit, and he does deserve it, he served as a check on putative-Prime Minister Gingrich steamrolling his pain-and-suffering agenda through.
Now, Barack Obama has come from the same school of thought, though of course to the far right (the actual "political centre") he might as well be waving a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, and everything he's done is "socialism."
Have Democrats been so cowed into timidity since Reagan, aided by the unrelenting, withering blasts of bullshit from talk radio and Fux Noise, that they have abandoned the principles of FDR, JFK or even Harry Truman?
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