Placing Obama on the Political Spectrum

Andrew Sullivan:

What the current movement right fails to get (but the left understands all too well) is that Obama is a moderate Republican president, and the polarization of the past three years has been a function almost entirely of the GOP's decision from 2008 on to oppose, obstruct and destroy a presidency that represented - and still represents - a massive rebuke to their extremism and failure this past decade.

They have responded by becoming an ultra-rightist, populist, revolutionary party, rather than a conservative one. Whatever its roots, it's the reason we are so far apart. Obama's moderate, pragmatic presidency isn't.