Some folks seem surprised that the Washington Post has endorsed Barack Obama, but it's hard to see why. It's true that Fred Hyatt has pushed the editorial page into a sharp right turn over the past few years, but the optimal vessel for that sort of ideology is a centrist Democrat, not an actual Republican. And there's plenty of reason to believe Obama will be exactly that. His economic advisers, Jason Furman and Austen Goolsbee (in addition to Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker) are folks The Washington Post is very comfortable with. These are budget balancers and free traders and PAYGO supporters and entitlement skeptics. His foreign policy team is rather more to the left, but not by all that much. And he's beholden to none of the social conservatives or Norquistian tax cutters that turn the Post's stomach. A centrist Democratic administration lets the Post hold the same opinions, but tuck them behind a Democratic resident, which cuts down on the flack from their left-leaning readers. A Republican administration, by contrast, puts them in a rather more difficult position, having to associate their right-leaning ideas with a Republican and encounter the constant opprobrium of the folks who prop up their fading business model. It's a bad situation. So whether Obama will turn out to be the guy they're hoping for is an open question, but he's certainly their best shot for the next four years.
