What Kind of Liberal is Obama? An Increasingly Crafty One

From the front pages of the nation’s biggest newspapers to the Web sites of conservative magazines, to the headline on my own post—apologies for its lack of originality—the reaction was uniform: President Obama delivered the most liberal inaugural address in decades, or possibly ever. “President Barack Obama began his second term Monday with an unapologetically liberal vision,” wrote Todd J. Gillman, of the Dallas Morning News. “In effect, Mr. Obama endorsed the entire liberal agenda as the guiding star of his next four years in the White House,” Fred Barnes opined for the Wall Street Journal.

Well, that’s settled then. But what sort of “liberal” is Obama? And is he really one at all? If he is, he represents a curious blend of liberal intent and conservative instincts, insisted über-blogger Andrew Sullivan. “But beneath all of it is a Toryism of sentiment, a Burkean and Niebuhrian understanding of liberal progress, a president with a grasp that tragedy and paradox stalk the human experience,” Sullivan wrote on Monday, “…a fusion of that great conservative insight into human affairs with that great liberal passion for a better future for more and more human beings: something perfectible, but never perfect.”

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