For more than a year, "movement" progressives, with almost singular focus, have admonished President Obama to emphatically "fight," to rhetorically bloody his opponents, to somehow shame the right with outspoken liberal clarity, since only then would the country come to comprehend the issues of the day with the selfsame clarity and thus regard the modern right as nothing more than the dull-witted collection of over-the-top reactionaries that it is.
Last week, against internal White House advice, Obama stood up as a stern advocate for religious tolerance, which, sad to say, it seems, now passes for a "liberal" position. What then came to pass? This week, polling analyst Charlie Cook released fresh projections for the midterms, announcing that within the last week a staggering 10 additional Democratic House seats had moved from the safe to questionable column. In view of that significant shift, Cook is now projecting that Republicans will regain 35-45 seats in November (39 are needed for a GOP House majority).
Coincidence? Was it just a quirk of timing, a peculiar happenstance, that soon after Obama interposed himself in the left-vs.-right mosque controversy, Democratic numbers in no less than 10 swing districts tanked? Cook wouldn't say. But I, for one, don't believe in coincidences of such magnitude.
To my friends on the left, this development should provide some key of insight as to where Democratic numbers in toto would be today had Obama, for the last year and a half, repeatedly presented himself as a "bold progressive," which "bold progressives" themselves have relentlessly demanded of him. Yet, the key will likely unlock nothing in their minds, since their minds remain closed to the immense political reality that ours is a centrist country -- a statistical phenomenon proved by Gallup year after year in its national surveys of ideological self-identification -- whose disposition, it follows, is rather unfriendly to doctrinaire liberalism.
I'm hardly fond of that reality. But I find that acknowledging unpleasant facts is always preferable to swimming in triumphalist delusions, which, I regret to add, is precisely what movement progressives are downright drowning in.
Obama has governed from the pragmatic center-left not because he's a traitor to the lofty progressive cause, as so many of the cause's advocates have come to believe, but because that's essentially where the country is -- in or around the center; because he's the president of all 50 united states and not some motivational speaker for a 20-percent liberal base; and because he's a damned smart politician who understands both preceding realities.
Had Obama indeed thundered as an undisguised progressive for the last 18 months, Charlie Cook would not be speculating presently about widespread Democratic losses; he would, rather, simply declare them a done deal.