Letter to the editor

I’m not sure how I feel about just retyping a letter I saw in a magazine and calling it a blog post. It’s not what I set out to do here, that’s for sure. But, I read a letter in this month’s Harper’s and it says exactly what I feel and think about our president’s perceived stature as a liberal. Or, more specifically, the country’s collective liberal mouthpiece’s ongoing insistence that it’s a stature that’s been abandoned by our president, which is impossible according to my calculations because his voting record clearly indicates that he wasn’t a liberal to begin with, at least not by my definition. But Chris Runk of New York City put it much more succinctly, so I’ll defer to her, or him:

In enumerating his proposals for a stronger America, George S. McGovern assumes that the president is a leftist and thus could be expected to endorse some of them [“A Letter to Barack Obama, Easy Chair, September]. This assumption is not new. Even before he was elected president, many of Obama’s champions took for granted his liberalism, notwithstanding that, as senator, he equivocated on free-trade agreements, indicated his support for an intensification of the war in Afghanistan, and voted for the release from civil liability of the telecommunications firms that assisted the Bush Administration’s wiretapping.

Some Obama apologists are keen to tout the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act as vindication of his liberal bona fides, but, in fact, that legislation represented the apotheosis of Obama’s “preemptive compromise” – in this case, an incremental, regressive abandonment of the ideal of universal health care.

And now, given the president’s near-total capitulation to Republican tax demagoguery, that anyone could still indulge in the pernicious illusion of his liberalism speaks more to the lamentable condition of liberals – and to the success of right-wing rhetoric – than to his political views.