Paul Waldman on the difficulty of making an ideological assessment on the Obama presidency:
Say this about President Barack Obama: He can keep ’em guessing. One day, he signs the most momentous piece of progressive social legislation in nearly half a century. Just a week later, he announces a plan to open up coastal areas for offshore drilling, reversing a position he held during the campaign. He may not quite have channeled Sarah Palin to chant “Drill, baby, drill!” but the news certainly brought his progressive supporters back down to earth.
With his drilling announcement, Obama made an appeal that has become almost rote. “We need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right,” he said, “between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure-all and those who would claim it has no place.” Surely he knows by now that there is no “beyond” left and right — not in this era.
