Ross Douthet, conservative blogger who will joining the NYT as their newest conservative op-ed columnist in a few weeks, asserts something that I've not seen anyone say before:
But there's a third answer as well - which is that the smart center-left, embodied by Larry Summers as much as anyone, has moved steadily leftward over the last ten years, as part of a broader Bush-era rapprochement between the Democratic Party's moderate and liberal factions. On health care, the environment, income inequality and other fronts, figures like Summers are closer to their erstwhile lefty antagonists than they used to be, sharing common ground even when they don't have identical policy preferences. Thus the Obama team can include many of the same people who worked for Bill Clinton in 1998 or so, and still produce a more leftward-tilting policy agenda than the second-term Clinton White House - because the people in question don't have the same priorities they did a decade ago.
I wonder what his evidence is for this.
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