Barack Obama promised change during his White House campaign last year and ran on a distinctly liberal platform of comprehensive health care reform, investing in new energy and good jobs, ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the very wealthy, and ending the war in Iraq. Obama won more votes than any other candidate in American history, and his victory capped off several years' worth of sweeping Democratic electoral wins.
Yet almost within hours of Obama's victory, portions of the political press corps insisted America remained firmly planted on the "center-right" of the political spectrum. "This country, even with the election of Barack Obama last night, remains a very centered country, or maybe even center-right in a lot of places," NBC's Tom Brokaw announced less than one day after Obama claimed victory. Brokaw later added, "We still remain a centered country or a center-right country when you look at the geographic distribution."
Soon Newsweek editor Jon Meacham insisted that to govern successfully, Obama had to become a center-right leader in order to match America's "instinctively conservative" streak. (The center-right press push actually began shortly before Election Day, with the late-October Newsweek cover story "America the Conservative.") And The Washington Post's David Broder warned that too many victorious Democrats in Congress had "ideas of their own about what should be done in energy, health care and education." Broder ignored the fact that surveys indicated most American favored many of those Democratic ideas.
From the press' perspective, the broad Democratic wins last November did not signify a sea change in American politics, which was how the media treated big Republican wins in 1980 and 1994. Instead, the Democratic wins last year unfolded in spite of voters' natural conservative leanings.
America: A Center-Left Nation