The subheadline of my latest on The Week reads: “The president may not have clowns to his left and jokers to his right — but he is in the middle. And what that means for his legacy has yet to be determined.” Here’s part of the column:
If you hear a dragging noise, it’s the sound of President Barack Obama moving the White House to the country’s middle. The other sounds you may be hearing are expressions of anger and dismay from the Republican right (which considers Obama far left no matter what) and from the Democratic left (which feels Obama has caved time and time again to an intransigent GOP).
With detractors on both sides, Obama is, for better or worse, now positioned in the political center on an array of domestic and foreign issues. On issue after issue — gun control, the Keystone oil pipeline, immigration reform, Social Security and Medicare, and more — any sober assessment puts Obama in the center. He has been moving there for years, most notably starting in his 2011 State of the Union address.
The real question isn’t if Obama is in the middle — it’s whether owning the center can translate into actual victories in Congress — and whether Obama’s political style is effective in a polarized Congress.
GO TO THE LINK to read it in full.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.