5 ms·

The first paragraph shows we're not talking real world here: Obama a "left-wing president"?

• jarek 14y ago
  That quote is presented as Mitt Romney's supposed view on "what would make things worse", not the Economist's.
• ams6110 14y ago
  He's not?
  • potatolicious 14y ago
    He really isn't. Some aspects of his administration are centrist-liberal (see: healthcare reform), and maybe to the largely-very-right-wing mainstream political sphere of the USA he's a leftist, but on the global stage Obama is pretty firmly in the center.
    • philwelch 14y ago
      Obama's healthcare reform is almost exactly the same plan the Republicans advanced as the conservative alternative to Hillarycare in the 1990's. On the other hand, he did nationalize two car companies....
      • potatolicious 14y ago
        He's campaigned for more extensive reforms than what actually took place - I'd place his position further left than the current state of health care. That said, mainstream politics in the US has shifted dramatically to the right since the 90s. The conservatism of the 90s is the "liberalism" of today.
    • saraid216 14y ago
      This, basically. America as a whole is pretty far right. When you're left of that, it's not very left at all.
      • tptacek 14y ago
        On a global scale, these "left" / "right" labels lose a lot of their meaning and are more a sign of a poorly framed discussion than a useful shorthand. Reconcile to "right" and "left" say, at-will employment, or a right to bear arms, or mandatory health insurance, or laws prohibiting Nazi sympathism, or vigorous loser-pays libel laws, or tax-free churches, or the right to keep and bear arms... the list goes on and on. The US is statist is some ways that Europe isn't, and libertarian in others. At the end of the day, these things all boil down to differing priorities and to different levels of policy sophistication.