Finally, the ideological imbalance in American politics today has nothing to do with Obama abandoning his post-partisan promises and picking up the mantle of big government. Instead, it’s almost entirely a consequence of the rightward shift of the Republican Party. One cannot watch the Republican presidential candidate debates or listen to Republican leaders in Congress without concluding they are an insurgent party set on undoing many decades of policy that once enjoyed bipartisan support.
Maneuvering tirelessly to stake out some elusive political center, in other words, won’t help Obama win over swing voters. It’ll just set him up for another year of looking weak and ineffectual. As even Brooks acknowledges, this is the approach Obama has followed most of his time in the White House—the one that Republicans turned into a political liability for the president through a disciplined campaign to oppose, obstruct, discredit, and nullify everything he has tried to do. It was perfectly understandable for Obama to try to deliver on his promise of a post-partisan Washington, even if he was naïve at best, disingenuous at worst. But by doing so he paid a tremendous political price, among his supporters, but also with swing voters, who were not much taken with his effort to work with Republicans to stave off a totally unnecessary threat of default—and who viewed him as weak when the process looked so dysfunctional in the end that the U.S got downgraded by Standard and Poor’s.
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