Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com has posted a wonderful chart which analyzes Obama’s list of specific policy proposals. His analysis is very interesting and something that we should continue to follow as it progresses to see how much can be accomplished.
This morning, I went to Obama’s website and began transcribing essentially all the specific policy proposals that he was willing to commit to publicly — as you will see, there are dozens and dozens of them. I then began classifying these positions on a truncated political spectrum running from liberal/progressive to center-right, further dividing the policies into economics and taxation (green), other domestic policy (yellow) and foreign affairs (blue). Here is what I came up with:
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I have to read Nate’s stuff early in the morning when my brain is firing on all cylinders. Otherwise, his brain power is too much for me. Yes, I’m admitting it. Nate is waaaay more intelligent than I could ever hope to be.
Nate’s graph does show that Obama isn’t as far left as some of the pre-election ads portrayed him to be. Imagine that.
WOW! That’s some full plate. I’m glad the President-Elect is young and vigorous.
When you combine Nate’s analysis with some of the pre-election pieces on sites like ourfuture.org, it’s clear that most Americans are more progressive than they realize.
The right has done a masterfully cynical job in convincing people that only the Republicans can save us. Seems we’re finally waking up. Dare we hope that we’re moving beyond labels to thinking about actual issues?!?! If an Obama presidency pisses off both the far left and the far right, he’s probably just about right for the country as a whole.
It will be interesting to see which parts of his agenda will be put on hold while we get our economic house in order. There is clearly a lot of education needed about the nature of deficits. We’ve been subjected to the conservative type, which generally have little to show for them unless you happen to be in the top 1% of the economic pile. But deficits that result in improved infrastructure or in job creation are actually investments in our future, much like the loans we and our kids take out to fund their college educations.
If Franken and Martin win, it might help to make Obama’s job just a tad bit easier.
The Franken / Coleman recount continues, and the Martin / Shameless run-off is tomorrow. My fingers are crossed.
Shameless won. Apparently Georgia has many low-information voters. What a shame.
Starshine,
I agree with you. I am trying to understand why the DNC just sort of let this one slip by. I have been wondering if this was just a battle that they thought was not worth fighting in the big scheme of things.
I suppose so. It’s a state that Obama did not take, so I guess they assumed Martin couldn’t take Georgia, either.
From all I’ve read, Martin is a good and decent man who has worked very hard for the people in Georgia.
Chambliss, on the other hand, is for big business. One needs to look no further than Imperial Sugar for proof.
Today I’ve read that the gopers think they’ve pulled off a huge victory with this one. Somehow this victory has set a new “standard” for winning an election. They couldn’t be more wrong. Georgia is a red state. Period. If a libertarian hadn’t been running for the seat, Chambliss would have won on Nov. 4th. Also, Georgians still buy into the negative ads. They believe what they see simply because their choice for Senate “says so”. One thing is for certain – Chambliss ran a dispicable campaign using smear ads against Martin that equalled the ones, six years ago, against Cleland. I’m not sure how Chambliss can sleep at night. Maybe he has no conscience.
Although Jim Martin did not win, he ran a good and clean campaign.