Obama Was Telling The Truth (Sadly)

President Obama seems to have a strange desire to keep beating his head on a brick wall -- metaphorically speaking. He keeps going on Fox News, in spite of the fact that the people at Fox have not even tried to be fair toward him. After all their lies and name-calling toward the president they somehow keep getting interviews with him.

I hope the president is not silly enough to believe he can get the fringe right-wingers at Fox to change and start doing real "fair and balanced" news. If he does, then he has gone as far from rational thinking as the talking heads at Fox -- and that would not be good for the country.

In spite of all that, I found one exchange on Sunday between the president and the odious Bill O'Reilly interesting. O'Reilly asked the president about moving toward the center to improve his approval rating with Americans. The inference was that the socialist, big government liberal president is beginning to see the light and moving further to the right.

Obama denied that he has moved to the center saying, "I haven't. I didn't move to the center. I'm the same guy." O'Reilly didn't believe him. He and his cohorts have been calling Obama a leftist for so long that they can't recognize the truth when they hear it. And sadly, President Obama was telling him the truth.

I'm afraid that I was one of those fooled by the president during the 2008 campaign. He talked like a progressive during the primary campaign, and I bought it. I was wrong. President Obama is now, and always has been, a center-right president (in the mold of Carter and Clinton).

He made this crystal clear with his health care reform. Instead of going to a progressive health care program (like government run single-payer insurance), or including progressive ideas in the reform (like a public option), he left the private insurance companies in charge of American's health care (even to the point of them telling doctors what treatments will and won't be paid for). A few needed restraints were instituted to keep the private companies from some of their worst abuses, there is no doubt that the "reform" left Americans at the mercy of those giant private insurance companies.

It was the same with the "re-regulation" of Wall Street financial firms. A real progressive would have gone much further to rein in the abuses of Wall Street, but Obama was happy to make a few relatively minor changes -- and let the giant financial companies go on raping ordinary Americans.

President Obama is not as far to the right as Bush, Reagan, Palin, Bachmann and others, but that does not mean he is a progressive, or that he ever was one. And it's time for us leftists to realize that. Expecting President Obama to make real progressive changes to America (changes that are badly needed) will just result in a lot of disappointment.