Comments on: Obama: Libertarian Paternalist?

By: Travis Prinzi

Travis Prinzi — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:21:57 +0000

He’s really, really left.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:25:39 +0000

I don’t buy the “he’s really, really left” meme.

Any new observations on that now?

By: Pauli

Pauli — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:54:51 +0000

When deciding how “nanny-state” Obama is we should take into account his huge sweeping national service proposals. What other Pres. candidate in recent times has proposed something like that? It’s a tax on time.

On abortion, Obama is left of about everybody in public office. He’s never opposed any restriction on abortion ever. You can’t say that about the many Democrats who voted for the partial-birth abortion ban.

By: lonelypilgrim

lonelypilgrim — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:47:04 +0000

If I recall correctly, during the primary season both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards said that Obama’s health care plan would not provide universal coverage to all Americans.

Also, for anyone with way to much time on his/her hands, look up Senate Roll Call vote 202 from the 109th congress, 2nd session…..which took place on July 13, 2006. It was an amendment to a Homeland Security appropriations bill restricting Federal agencies such as FEMA from confiscating guns during a national emergency such as Hurricane Katrina or 9/11. The amendment passed 84-16. You could probably guess some of the 16 who voted against it………Feinstein, Boxer, Kennedy and Schumer. But Obama voted for it. Hillary Clinton voted against it.

I won’t vote for Obama either, but these two examples show that he is definitely not as far to the Left as Hillary Clinton.

By: Travis Prinzi

Travis Prinzi — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:03:36 +0000

I’m certainly not saying he’s not “left,” or even “quite left.” I’d want to read the entire context of that quote. I wouldn’t want the final decision on me to come down to the loonies I hung out with in college. Either way, I’m less concerned about that than I am about what his actual policies will accomplish. I don’t like Obama’s policies on the whole, but my main point is that he’s less nanny-state than Clinton and many other Democrats.

I think the discussion demonstrates the inherent difficulty and problematic nature of standard, tacitly-accepted left/right categorization.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:02:16 +0000

I’ll read the George Will article later, so maybe I’m sticking my foot in my mouth, but I can’t ignore this quote from Obama’s first book:

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.”

While I don’t buy into the right’s “everyone with a ‘D’ next to their name is evil” meme, I nonetheless get the impression that this particular guy is way left. Likable, and probably a good guy. But way left.