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It’s unfair to compare presidents’ ideologies without considering context

by Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, February 8th 2012 -

In 2008, when Barack Obama was running for president, he began a minor furor by saying that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path.” The implication was that Obama wanted to put the nation on a fundamentally different path, too. And, in the context of a Democratic primary, that was taken to mean a more liberal path.

But in a recent analysis, political scientist Keith Poole applied his model for measuring politicians’ ideologies to Obama and Clinton and found Obama to be the more moderate one, at least judging by the coalitions of lawmakers who supported his initiatives.

Every model has its limits. But Poole’s effort raises an interesting question: Can we really compare the ideologies of presidents? Or does the surrounding context change so much that such studies are useless?

Consider their economic policies. Among Clinton’s first major fights in office was the 1993 budget, which raised taxes on the rich, on corporations and on fuel. The measure passed with no Republican votes. Obama, in contrast, cut taxes during his first two years in office and has called for extending most George W. Bush-era tax cuts. So in a simple analysis in which higher taxes are coded as liberalism, Clinton was clearly more liberal. In fact, Obama’s preferences more closely mirror Bush’s tax policy than Clinton’s.

Clinton’s health-care policy was, similarly, much more liberal than Obama’s. The simplest way to establish this is to note that Obama’s policy is almost a carbon copy of the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, which was one of the leading Republican alternatives to Clinton’s proposal.

But Obama’s place in the party is very different from Clinton’s. Obama comes from what I’d call the pragmatic-liberal wing. Clinton was a reformer. Before he ran for the presidency, Clinton’s political project was to pull the Democratic Party to the center. Nothing in Obama’s history is comparable to Clinton’s chairing of the Democratic Leadership Council. Nor is anything comparable to Clinton’s passing of welfare reform, although perhaps there would have been if House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had been able to reach an agreement with the White House in August.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/its-unfair-to-compare-presidents-ideologies-without-considering-context/2012/02/08/gIQAs1FB0Q_story.html