Why the sudden urge to move the party right?

[zipplewrath]

110. Not sure Obama would agree

President Obama said his economic policies are "so mainstream" he'd be considered a moderate Republican in the 1980s.

In a Thursday interview with a Miami-based local television station, Obama said he thinks few people believe he wants to impose socialism on the country.

"The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican," he told Noticias Univision 23 in a White House interview.

That sounds like the party as a whole has moved to the right alot. Of course this is only on economic policy. But on foreign policy, it might be harder to judge. We certainly aren't the anti-war party of the late '60s and early '70s. And we did ramp up the war in Afghanistan after Obama was elected, not to mention we never actually left. But we also resisted going into Syria alot as well as Lybia and Yemen. And we resisted returning to Iraq, although we reluctantly had to back away from that because of Syria and Isis. Alternately, we became the party of drone strikes and of classifying the torture photos. Not to mention we didn't advocate the closing of Gitmo, but merely the moving it to American soil.

On Civil rights we have a much better track record. Despite some resistance within the party, we've moved forward with LGBTQ rights including at this point marriage equality. We attempted to defend privacy rights as well. We've stayed pretty firm on reproductive rights, including women's health rights, even with the ACA and have taken no small amount of political heat on that. I really don't think we can take much of a hit on voting rights. We've just continued to lose that battle, through no real fault of our own.

We've wandered aimlessly on gun control, but if anything Clinton tried to move that left and the party took a heck of a hit over it.

So I suppose it is a bit like the blind people touching the elephant, it kinda depends upon which part one is touching. The perception that the party has move to the right has I suspect predominately due to their positions on free trade and their weakening support of unions, and generally their overall weakness on issues like Glass-Steagall and bank bailouts. The embracing of the whole PAC thing after Citizens United has had an "optics" problem from the get-go, doing one thing and saying another. But I suspect that is in the noise.