Obama, the Center-Left Pragmatic Reformer

Columnist David Brooks has a wonderfully written article about the misjudgment of Obama from the political left and the right. Here are my favorite lines:

The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.

Brooks goes on to describe Obama's views on health care, education, finance, and foreign policy with those assumptions in mind. It seems odd that when I seen the nation disapproving more than approving of our President, that I've grown to appreciate him more. My sunny disposition was solidified when he said this about the health care reform debate:

I don't know that those gaps can be bridged, it may be that at the end of the day, we come out here and everybody says, 'Well, you know, we have some honest disagreements.'

and this:

The question that I'm going to ask myself and I ask of all of you is, is there enough serious effort that in a month's time or a few weeks' time or six weeks' time we could actually resolve something? And if we can't, then I think we've got to go ahead and make some decisions, and then that's what elections are for.

It's not about good vs. evil. It's an honest disagreement about the role of government. The Democrats should do what they feel is best and the Republicans should do the same. Then the voters will decide who did what they wanted.