[T]he liberal president is taking some action, but to remain in the center Cohen must warn him not to become too European, despite lacking evidence that this is happening or even objecting to what the president does. If there's a chance to refer to his time living in France, so much the better.It is worth noting that liberalism of Obama's stripe is actually a centrist philosophy in the grand scheme of things. There's right-wingery, there's liberalism and there's leftism, i.e. socialism or communism. Right-wingery in America seeks to maximize private ownership, leftism seeks to achieve public ownership of the means of production. Liberalism is a principled middle ground, which largely grants the right's case on free-market capitalism while allowing that the state needs to assume some duties to make sure an even playing field since capitalism's core premises frequently do not hold, and the free market as the right-wingers conceive it doesn't actually exist. Much of my thinking on this issue comes from my readings of Herb Simon, a Nobel laureate who actually proved that the free market, the rational economic actor, etc., are all based on flawed assumptions but that what we have functions anyway.
So that's where I'm coming from. And it's where Obama's coming from. Obviously, there are other ideologies and theories of economics, and some of those, like neoliberalism, are more to the right of Obama and myself. But Nelson, Bayh, et al. aren't really bound by any particular theory of economics. Their philosophy seems less like a coherent way of viewing the world and more like a way to avoid taking hard stances on anything, so that way nobody in their states will be angry at them so that they can keep winning. And so be it--public servants ought to want to win their seats again, it's a good accountability measure. But this country--including quite a few people in Indiana and Nebraska--voted for Obama last fall. In fact, Obama carried Indiana outright and won one of Nebraska's electoral votes. And during the campaign, he promised to raise taxes on the top 2% of the population to pay for cutting taxes on most everyone else. Republicans vociferously attacked these policies, so much so that the last several weeks of the campaign included frequent attacks on "spreading the wealth around" and "socialism". Americans proved more than comfortable with redistributivism and voted Obama in, not finding the conservative case compelling. Obama won the conversation, and he won quite a few Republican states making it. I suppose Nelson, Bayh and the rest are still under the impression that it's 1996 and that you just can't articulate progressive economic principles and win. That's exactly what Obama did, though, and he won in part because of it. These dudes really need to either get on the train or get off the tracks.
Update: In fact, it seems to me that right now is perhaps the worst time to fight against raising taxes on bankers, speculators and the like. I wonder if Obama will summon that sort of populist outrage--i.e. it was rich people that caused this damn mess, and they should pay to fix it! My sense is that there is so much anger at the moneyed classes right now that a much more ambitious redistribution scheme could plausibly pass on grassroots anger right about now.
