When the chips are down, Goodbye Mistah Soljah

Goodbye Mistah Soljah

by digby

So the General Election has officially begun and the predictable "race to the middle" is in full swing. What, you ask, has Mitt Romney finally distanced himself from the Birthers? Well, no. They're holding fundraisers for him. Is he tacking back to the center on the war on women? Not hardly. So, what's going on?

Well, we have Barack Obama bragging about his devotion to cutting spending. And now the campaign is out there touting their hostility to public employee unions. Dday writes:

It looks like we’re going to have six more months of the Obama campaign trying to prove that their candidate has conservative values and believes in conservative ideas. That’s what we can learn from the latest fact check from Deputy Campaign Manager for Obama 2012 Stephanie Cutter.

FACT CHECK: Romney off on Obama’s relationship with teachers’ unions; it’s anything but cozy: http://wapo.st/Lu0nYZ

The link takes you to a story at the Washington Post with the same name as what Cutter quoted approvingly. And I can’t say that anything in the Post’s fact-check is wrong. It makes the case that President Obama has promoted ideas and instituted policies that teachers’ unions oppose, and that’s true:

"Education “reform” is a pretty contentious topic with a split in the Democratic coalition. But Obama has always lined up on the opposite side of the unions on the matter. Not only that, he boasts of it."

They don't have any shortage of such "achievements" to tout as proof of their center right bona fides, from the civil liberties crackdown to the record number of deportations of undocumented workers. But I'm fairly sure that in order for this to have the desired effect, the middle must be some agreed upon place between the two parties, and the other side must tack back to that place as well. Is there any evidence that this "center" exists?

Update: When was the last time a GOP candidate for any office boasted about flouting a major conservative constituency? I'm, sure it must happen sometimes, but nothing comes to mind.

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