Obama's Agenda & The Difference Between Tactics & Strategy (Nate Silver)

[jefferson_dem]

Obama's Agenda & The Difference Between Tactics & Strategy

There is, to say the least, a lot of jumping to conclusions about just which type of President Barack Obama is liable to be, by which I mean whether he'll govern from the left or the center. This speculation has been principally based on his cabinet appointments, a subject that people may be reading too much into. The initial Bush cabinet contained a number of people who could be described as moderate or center-right, including Colin Powell, Tommy Thompson, Norman Mineta, Christine Todd Whitman, Paul O'Neill and arguably Mitch Daniels and Ann Veneman. Obviously, this was balanced out to some degree by the Rumsfelds and the Ashcrofts, but it is not clear that Bush's 2001 cabinet was any more right-wing than Obama's 2009 cabinet is left-wing. Bush ran a very conservative government -- but the authority came from the top down.

Most of this discussion, moreover, has dwelt in the realm of tactics, presentation and salesmanship rather than grand strategy. One can "govern from the center" and implement a number of liberal policies -- by shifting the Overton Window a couple of panes at a time, and selling classically liberal policies as commonsensical and centrist. (Which, in the case of some major items like health care and clean energy, they already are). Likewise, as David Sirota notes, one can co-opt leftist rhetoric, enthusiasm and mindshare and implement a centrist agenda, as Bill Clinton arguably did.

In the case of Barack Obama, however, I would argue that there is not as much need to worry about tactics. If his campaign was any indication, Obama is not much of an outsourcer -- he will dictate the tone of his administration. Moreover, we actually have quite a bit of information about what his longer-term goals are. This morning, I went to Obama's website and began transcribing essentially all the specific policy proposals that he was willing to commit to publicly -- as you will see, there are dozens and dozens of them. I then began classifying these positions on a truncated political spectrum running from liberal/progressive to center-right, further dividing the policies into economics and taxation (green), other domestic policy (yellow) and foreign affairs (blue). Here is what I came up with:

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http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/obamas-agenda-difference-between.html