What's the difference between a "liberal" and a "leftist," if there is one...

[Warren Stupidity]

72. yeah that's it, I'm a right winger.

Obama is center right on economic issues. As in my example, health care, he supports market based solutions. Liberals and leftists support democratic socialist approaches, for example extending medicare to everyone.

When rightwingers claim Obama is a socialist, they ignore the obvious fact that on economic issues he is neither left nor liberal. That is not because they have any point, it is because they are bald-faced liars of the worst sort.

A 'liberal' might be a capitalist, for example Warren Buffet is both an actual capitalist and a 'liberal'. Obama is neither, he is a center-right politician, by which I mean he supports a neo-liberal ideology (which is what you probably meant by 'capitalist'), as opposed to the center-left democratic socialist reformist New Deal politics of FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ. Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton were all distinctly not in the center-left mold of the New Deal democrats. Some here would like to paper over that divide, but it is very real and has very much to do with why I claim that Obama (and Clinton and Carter) are not liberals.

Liberals are indeed reformists who shy away from overt democratic control over the private sector, (which is why I noted that they are scared of the 'socialist' label) except when they do of course, such as the (to me) defining issue of our health care system. Liberals and those more to the left all generally agree that we should run the 'health care finance and insurance industry' as a public institution merged into the same public institution that currently operates medicare. Democrats who oppose single-payer are across the divide between left and right.