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Column: How far left has America moved?

 
Published Feb. 12, 2016

From the earliest days of Barack Obama's presidency, a comforting assumption developed among much of the center-right political world. The thinking went like this: President Obama was far more liberal than the majority of the country. But given his extraordinary political talents, the fatigue of the George W. Bush years, the economic crisis and the excitement of electing the first African-American president, the country picked him not because of his ideology but in spite of it.

Once this unique political figure was no longer on the ballot, America would revert to the less liberal, more center-right direction that was the norm after World War II. Under this scenario, Obama wasn't some profound historical shift but more of an eccentric diversion.

Now it's February 2016 and an obscure socialist — okay, a democratic socialist — from a tiny state just beat one of the most powerful forces in the Democratic Party in the New Hampshire primary. On the Republican side, a man whom National Review, the conservative movement's flagship publication, has vigorously denounced, also won New Hampshire in a rout.

How did we get here?

When he entered the presidential race in 2007, Obama had amassed a voting record that was ranked by National Journal as the most liberal in the U.S. Senate. In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton's campaign warned that the young senator's record would lead to defeat in November. In that general election, Sen. John McCain prosecuted the same ideological case, with little success. Big hunks of America had fallen in love with Obama.

Though only 16 years separated the election of Bill Clinton and that of Obama, the two politicians seemed to represent the same party in name only. The 1992 campaign was dedicated to defining "a different kind of Democrat." That was basically a nicely packaged phrase to stress that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were not crazy — or weak — liberals like the party's recent lineup of losers.

These new Democrats were for the death penalty and couldn't wait to get into office to "end welfare as we know it." They even broke the Republican hold on the South, winning not only their home states of Arkansas and Tennessee but also Louisiana and Georgia. The 1992 Democratic campaign was a calculated defense against charges of liberalism. Clinton defined his candidacy by asserting that Democrats could handle center-right issues like crime and welfare.

By 2008 a different set of issues emerged, addressed with a new vocabulary. Obama made the case that he and the Democratic Party were best able to deal with the crushing pain of disappearing jobs and escalating inequality. The urgent need to prevent any more terrorist attacks had morphed to an urgent longing to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Liberals now called themselves progressives and embraced the label.

The Barack Obama legacy debate is just beginning. One point up for discussion: whether the president pushed the country left, or whether he was just in step with how people felt. He passed the Affordable Care Act, announced support for same-sex marriage, and has argued passionately (if unsuccessfully) for more gun control.

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For Republicans, this mostly proves that the president is out of sync with the majority of the country, though on same-sex marriage, the country has clearly changed. As the political scientist Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, has shown, in the 2012 election more voters saw Obama as being to the left of their beliefs than saw Mitt Romney as being to their right.

But so far into the 2016 election, conservatives are on the run. Democrats are battling over who can really move the country left. And the leading Republican candidate is a man who has previously praised Canada's single-payer health care system and described himself as "very pro-choice."

This starts to paint a very different picture of the direction of the country. Instead of Obama representing a quirky left shift engendered by his charisma, Iraq and the Great Recession, what if he turned out to have been a transitional figure to a considerably more leftward tilt? What if in 10 or 20 years we look back on the Obama years and they seem as conservative as the 1992 "Different Kind of Democrat" years do now?

In this global economy that everyone talks about but no one seems able to define, maybe larger forces are nudging the United States left. Unemployment is low and yet only 23 percent of the country believes we are headed in the right direction. Something clearly is wrong.

We've heard that this election is rewriting old rules. Mostly that refers to the success of nontraditional candidates like Trump and Sanders. But there's always the chance that something more fundamental is afoot. Perhaps the reality of the new American economy is becoming too exhausting.

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare," opponents of the president's health care bill once demanded. Like that confused, plaintive cry, will this be the election cycle when voters in both parties accept that they want a growing benevolent government, as long as they don't have to admit they need it?

S­tuart Stevens, Mitt Romney's chief campaign strategist in 2012, is the author of the forthcoming novel "The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear." © 2016 New York Times