Granby01033

Conservatives are fond of calling America a center-right country. So are some pundits. After Obama was elected on Tuesday, Americans were treated to the following insights:

GOP STRATEGIST BAY BUCHANAN: There’s no question in my mind [the United States is still a center-right country].

NBC’S TOM BROKAW: This country, even with the election of Barack Obama last night, remains a very centered country, or maybe even center right in a lot of places.

KARL ROVE: Barack Obama understands this is a center-right country, and he smartly and wisely ran a campaign that emphasized it.

As Kevin Drum points out (he collated the above quotes too), the candidate who was accused of running a socialist campaign was transformed into a center-right candidate in less than 24 hours. Rove and Buchanan’s comments can be explained away by their party affiliation, but Brokaw is supposed to know better.

America may not be a center-left country, but there are some facts, rather than wishful thinking, that suggest we are a lot farther left than the GOP would like us to think. Eric Alterman writes:

As the political scientist Drew Westen aptly observes, the word liberal for most Americans implies “elite, tax and spend, out of touch,” and “Massachusetts.”⁵² And yet the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, D.C., in conducting an extensive set of opinion polls over the past few decades, has demonstrated a decided trend toward increasingly “liberal” positions, by almost any definition.

To offer just a few examples of this liberal-in-all-but-name attitude regarding economic and welfare policy, according to the 2006 survey, released in March 2007, roughly 70 percent of respondents believe that the government has a responsibility “to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves” — up from 61 percent in 2002.

 The number saying that the government should guarantee “every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep” has increased by a similar margin over the past five years (from 63 percent to 69 percent). Two-thirds of the public (66 percent) — including a majority of those who say they would prefer a smaller government (57 percent) — favor government funded health insurance for all citizens.

Most people also believe that the nation’s corporations are too powerful and fail to strike a fair balance between profits and the public interest. In addition, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) say corporate profits are too high, about the same number who say that “labor unions are necessary to protect the working person” (68 percent).

When it comes to the environment, a large majority (83 percent) supports stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment, while 69 percent agree that “we should put more emphasis on fuel conservation than on developing new oil supplies,” and fully 60 percent of people questioned say they would “be willing to pay higher prices in order to protect the environment.”

Americans… would prefer to see their churches lead on issues such as alleviating “poverty and hunger” (75 percent), “homelessness” (61 percent), “government corruption” (58 percent), “terrorism” (56 percent), “the environment” (54 percent), and “health care” (52 percent).

Americans specifically reject the conservative Christian desire to suppress science in the service of religious dogma. The same overwhelming number endorses the view that “stem cell research can be a force for moral good rather than a moral failing.”⁵