Readable righty Daniel Lairson on Obama: "The one thing that some of the neoliberals got wrong, foreign policy, was the one thing Obama has chosen to imitate for the most part, while ignoring or discounting the neoliberal domestic policy shifts that were, in fact, reasonably successful." I have to say I don't see what you can point at to make this claim.
Barack Obama is not campaigning on a promise to "re-create welfare as we knew it" or reconstitute the Civilian Aeronautics Board. Hillary Clinton has a record of doing things like voting against the Republican Faux Wedge Issue Act, and supports allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the military. Obama's standard answer to education questions includes a long diatribe about how "parents have to parent"; he admonishes college students to keep their credit card debt down by eating in more often; like all candidates earned citizenship for undocumented immigrants is contingent upon learning English. In short, there's no little daylight between the candidates on domestic policy issues that have any sort of cultural tint to it. There were a small number of third-tier issues surrounding criminal justice and drug policy (an area where Obama has more experience than Clinton) where he was to the left, but since she started losing primaries, Clinton has adopted the Obama position on most of these issues. That leaves the war, as well as some secondary foreign policy issues, where Obama has truly rejected the centrism of the '90s.
To a certain extent this image of Clinton as the cultural conservative in the race is due to the Reverend Wright "issue", the bitter thing, and Clinton trumpeting her hardscrabble life as the daughter of a (management) garment worker. Primarily, though it's because her supporters look more like the Reagan Democrats of yore. But this has little to do with Clinton qua Clinton and much more to do with Clinton as the putative frontrunner; the establishment candidate's electoral coalition always begins at the bottom of the income/education scale and works its way up, while the challenger's starts at the top and works its way down. If the Democratic Party had decided the safe thing to do for the '08 election was line up behind Mark Warner, Clinton would look like the old-line liberal that Larison's afraid of.
