I was simply floored this morning when I heard
NPR's Mara Liasson (sorry, I can't seem to link directly to the audio file in question: it's the ninth "individual" story, entitled, "Democratic Voices, Old and New, Call for Unity") describe Barack Obama as "a rising centrist."
She characterized his speech as being in the Clinton tradition of portraying one's opponents as the practitioners of the politics of division, admitting that government wasn't the solution to every problem, yadda, yadda, yadda. Which is true, to a limited extent.
There is no way anybody who listened to Obama speak last night--and doubly so for anybody who heard him on the Illinois campaign trail--could reasonably describe his positions as "centrist." One Republican attack line we in Illinois have heard over and over again about Obama is that he's the most liberal candidate the Illinois Democratic Party has put in the field in a generation. His positions are progressive.
Obama, however, is a progressive with a difference. As you might expect from someone with his credentials (bachelor's in political science from Columbia; J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law, where he was also editor of the law review; senior lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago), Obama is capable of balancing opposing viewpoints. He can take two seemingly contradictory positions and find in them the common ground that leads to a new synthesis incorporating the best parts of both viewpoints. His is not the black-and-white world of Commander Codpiece and his handler-minions, but the nuanced, slippery, sometimes confusing gray-shaded world in which most of the rest of us live and move and have our being. He can stand for progressive ideas without castigating or demonizing those who oppose him. He recognizes the necessity of speaking to everyone and not just those who agree with him.
But this is precisely the kind of multivariate stance that the modern media abhors. They just don't know what to do with someone who doesn't fall neatly into one of their preconceived categories of "liberal" or "conservative." So they call him a "centrist" and try to shoehorn him, rough edges and all, into a pigeonhole that in no way represents the candidate or his policy positions.
It's beginning to look like the NPR of old, where you actually could get a look at more than just two sides of a story, is going extinct more rapidly than the dinosaurs. Good thing there are other sources of news out there to which I can turn when I don't want to hear the same old tired spin recycled in the form of "news."
Or maybe I'm just out to lunch. Take the poll and let me know what you think: