Is Obama Less Liberal Now? Not Really

  • Bob Fertik's picture
    Bob Fertik
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July 08, 2008

A new Rasmussen poll is turning some pundits' and bloggers' brains to mush.

Voters Perceive Obama Moving to the Middle

During the Primary campaign season, Obama was viewed as politically liberal by an ever-increasing number of voters that grew to 67% by early June. However, since clinching the nomination, he has reversed that trend and is now seen as liberal by only 56%.

So what caused that shift? Was it Obama's allegedly center-moving shifts on FISA, Iraq, guns, and God? Let's look at the calendar.

The shift for Obama is clear through the weekly surveys taken in June. Twenty-nine percent (29%) of voters surveyed June 7-8 rated Obama Very Liberal; by June 28-29, that number had fallen 5 percentage points to 22%.

First, the math doesn't add up - 29-22=7%, not 5%. But either way, that's a relatively small decline.

Second, the dates don't add up. Most of Obama's alleged "shifts" were during the week that ended June 28-29. But they were each small stories that got little or no coverage during that week. The broader narrative about Obama "moving to the center" didn't emerge until over the July 4th holiday and is therefore not the most likely cause of the drop, however small it is.

If the drop in liberal perception was statistically significant, it's more likely due to other causes - perhaps a comparision with the ever-more-conservative John McCain, or perhaps just a growing familiarity with and approval of Obama.

Comments

Hedge Fund Liberalism

  • july26's picture
    july26
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11/16/10
4:56am

What. . .Obama is liberal? I suppose if one believes that the previous plutocrat wanted small government and supported freedoms, then yes. . .By all means the current "bank teller" can be viewed as a liberal. There was a time you know when liberal didn't mean supporting monopolies by stealing our tax dollars and handing it over to them. There was a time when liberal didn't mean mandating the buying of insurance and backing it up with a law drawn up by the insurance industry. Even better still. . .There was a time when Americans realized that what is now viewed as liberal (and for that matter conservative) is as far from the truth of those terms as I am currently from the moon. Wake up dummies! You're being made fools of. Liberal is a term now used for posturing. Once it was a term used for changing the world. Robber Barons ran in fear and factory owners crawled like worms in its shadow. Now it is tool of division of its day. Once it was race. Once it was ethnicity. Once it was the sexes. Now they tear a rift within us by how we vote yet if you remove the rotten wallpaper you'll see that it is the same material underneath. The parties are neither liberal nor conservative. Their job is to maintain the status quo. That is, keep our eyes away from real issues while they do the bidding of the military/industrial machine. Their job is to maintain a corrupt banking system where you, dear fellow American carries the interest through your hard earned dollar. Their job is to create the imagine of extreme political differences while in truth your vote does in no way change our foreign policy. Fat rich white men run this country and sadly so did their grandads, so really nothing has changed since "liberal" meant more and I do not imagine that it will until we unglue ourselves from misguided beliefs. Our prez is not a liberal because he is an employee. He takes orders. That simple. I believe he is a smart and articulate person capable of leading a nation but so long as he serves those that hold the financial keys he is at best a hedge fund Democrat reading their contrived speaches on a teleprompter. The truth is out there. By ignortantly believing something is liberal when it does nothing to prove it is denial at best and an a subtle form of treason at worst.