“I think it’s important to remember that the positions I’m taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party.”
The President spoke at an Associated Press luncheon yesterday and reminded campaign journalists about the false-equivalence fallacy:
“I think that there is often times the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and an equivalence is presented — which reinforces I think people’s cynicism about Washington generally.”
Note that Obama changed his position on the mandate policy, but remember that the mandate was a conservative idea, embraced by Republican policymakers for years.
Obama went from supporting a single-payer plan during the 2008 campaign to supporting a plan designed by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and backed by moderate Republicans throughout the ’90s.
Does this strike you as Obama moving to the left? As the Republicans look to tear down the plan they had previously recommended, who is really moving away from the center?
Filed under: Announcement, budget, campaign, Congress, Economics, election, Finance, government, history, News, Opinion, Politics, President Obama, primaries, quote, vote, Warning, Word from Bill Tagged: Associated Press, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Obama, President, Republicans, United States, Washington
