I Do Believe Ezra Klein Has It Right About Obama

First off, I have to say that next to Glenn Greenwald at Salon, my favorite blogger/writer/poster is Gaius Publius (I believe that's a pseudonym for blogger Gabriel Arana at AMERICAblog). He is spot on with much of his analysis of the economy, the presidency, the political climate of the country, etc.

His most recent post, entitled "Ezra Klein: Obama is 'a moderate Republican of the early 1990s'" contains some interesting quotes by Ezra, as well as some funny commentary of his own.

Ezra Klein has an interesting (and well structured) piece about all the things that President Obama isn't (Muslim, socialist, birthless), and the one thing he is — a Republican. Mr. Klein (my emphasis throughout):

A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

He does save his best comment for the end of the post, though.

And if I may be so bold, I don't think it's a given that radical Republicanism, 2010-style, is just anti-Obamaism, as Klein asserts. Republicans have been moving the goalposts into the next county for most of our lives.

It's what they do. They're not going to stop until it's 1880 again, an era in which those nasty immigrants were, at the very least, appropriately hued. The next Democratic president could be to the left of Chairman Mao, and those Republican goalposts would still be to the right of the Atlantic seaboard.

(Stifling a guffaw).