U.S. Shifted Party, Not Ideology

Barack Obama was not elected for his liberal policies. America is a center-right nation. Obama was elected because people personally liked him and the economy was doing horribly; he was not elected because people actually like liberal policies as he is quickly finding out .

clipped from online.wsj.com The Democratic party's problems, crystallized in the last-ditch scramble to save Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat in a special election Tuesday, can be traced to a simple mistake: Many in the party misread voters' desire to switch parties in recent years as an ideological shift to the left. In fact, there is little sign that Americans' ideological tendencies changed much at all, even as voters gave control of Congress to Democrats in 2006 and handed President Barack Obama and the rest of his party a massive victory in 2008. Ideologically, the country remained throughout this period what it was at the outset: a center to center-right nation. In retrospect, the problem for Democrats was that some in the party—particularly in the liberal wing that is dominant in the House of Representatives—seemed to read this shift away from Republicans as a shift to the left. The share of Americans calling themselves liberal has gone down a bit, to 21% this month.