Barack Obama: Very Liberal or Just a Moderate Democrat for Change?

When Barack Obama started running for the Democratic presidential nomination, it seemed like he was a very liberal Democrat. In vote after vote in the Senate, Obama voted the left-wing line. Against Alito (of course). Against Roberts. Always voting against the Iraq war. Always voting with the Democratic majority, and usually with the liberal-left wing of that majority. He looked like a very liberal Democrat. And then, early this year, a National Journal survey showed him to have the most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2007. (National Journal, January 31, 2008)*

But recently I have begun to wonder. Since winning the nomination, Obama has criticized the Supreme Court decision that it was unconstitutional to impose the death penalty in child rape cases. He has supported the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. These are not positions of what Howard Dean called the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Obama has also said his rhetoric during the primaries against NAFTA was overheated. Even his statements on abortion have seemed to moderate a little, at least when compared with the standard NOW line.

All of this has made me wonder what Barack Obama really believes. Is he really the left-wing liberal that his votes in the Senate in 2007 told us he was and like he was earlier this year when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, criticizing all those bitter people clinging to their religion and guns? Or is he the more moderate, almost centrist Democrat we have been seeing in the last couple of months who supports the death penalty for child rapists and gun rights?

I don’t know for sure, but I do have a guess. Let me explain. To do so, I first need to take a look at Senator Obama’s political career. (Don’t worry. It won’t take long,)

Obama’s first elected political office was State Senator from the Hyde Park area of Chicago. This is the area around the University of Chicago, and it is a liberal, a very liberal, area. And so, when Obama was in the Illinois Senate, he voted very liberal. There has been a big controversy over some votes Obama cast on certain abortion bills when he was in the Illinois Senate. A couple of weeks ago Obama mis-spoke, as they say, about those votes. Whether his "confusion" about those votes was deliberate or a result of a poor memory isn’t relevant for my point here. What is relevant is that Obama today is taking a position on abortion that is more centrist and moderate than the position he took back then. In other words, when Obama was representing the super-liberal people of Hyde Park, he took an extremely liberal position on abortion. Once he became the Democratic nominee for president and his audience became all the people in the United States, Obama’s position shifted – or at least became more nuanced, as they also say. But the key is that in both cases Obama was reflecting his constituents – or at least the people he hoped would become his constituents.

Obama’s races for the United States Senate in 2004 don’t tell us much. Both his main opponent in the Democratic primary and his original Republican opponent in the general election had their campaigns torpedoed by disclosures from old divorce cases. And running against Alan Keyes tells us nothing.

I do not know when Obama started thinking about running for President. It may have been right after his speech to the Democratic convention in 2004, but you would have to think it was certainly by the summer of 2006. By the end of 2006, his presidential ambitions were obvious. To win the Democratic primary, you have to run left. And this is what Obama did – and maybe this is how he came to have the most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2007. He continued along that path until he finally got the nomination, at which point things seemed to shift to the center, as I noted above,

So what does this tell us about Obama? Does it tell us he is very liberal, except when political expedience makes him take more moderate positions? Or does it tell us that he is really moderate, except when political expedience (and his constituents) requires him to take liberal positions?

The fact is we don’t know. All that we know is that he always seems to take positions that fit with his party and with his constituents – and whatever office he is seeking. Whether in the U.S. Senate or the Illinois Senate, whether campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president or for the presidency itself, Senator Obama’s positions always seem to fit whatever he needs to say given what he is running for at that time. Whether that makes you feel comfortable about what Obama might do as president, I leave to you.

------------------
* In the August 28 Chicago Tribune Steve Chapman argued that Obama might not be all that liberal. With respect to the National Journal survey, Chapman said that another survey found him to be just the 11th-most liberal Senator. In response to criticism of its rating system by Obama supporters, Charles Green of the National Journal noted that "[i]f Obama had voted differently a couple of times, or if we [i.e., the National Journal] had added or subtracted a couple of other votes in our ratings, he might not have been ranked as the most liberal senator. Perhaps he would have ended up as the fourth-most-liberal senator. Or maybe the sixth-most-liberal senator." (National Journal, August 28, 2008) In other words, even if he wasn’t the most liberal senator in 2007, he was still one of the most liberal senators in 2007.