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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (55222)	6/2/2009 3:25:37 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 149317

I view center as the ability to cast aside political ideologies and decide on an issue purely on its merits and demerits. Than there is no center as merits and demerits are largely determined in relation to ideology. Lets some some policy strongly increased equality, but slowed economic growth a bit and slightly decreased personal liberty. How do you evaluate that? You need to weigh an equality against economic growth and liberty. Such trade offs are what ideology is about. You can cast aside partisanship and decide an issue on the merits but partisanship and ideology are different. Partisanship is rooting for "your team" (party), in the most extreme cases even against the best interest of "the game" (country, world). Its not about what you think is better or right, its about supporting the group you like more. So you can cast it aside, but you can't really cast aside ideology. Toss ideology aside and you have no basis for determining the merits and demerits. (Even extreme cases like say choosing between living in a society like that in North Korea, and living in once like the US are ideological, its just that you only need to accept ideological ideas that are almost universally accepted to prefer the US.) I see Obama's approach to be more in line with a centrist's approach. Well as I said before the center is hard to define, but I see him as quite radical, compared to recent presidents, which seems to be the opposite of centrist. Some would argue that the major changes are needed, but even if one assumes that is the case "making radical changes" and "centrist" don't really go hand in hand.