2. I started working on a post yesterday (before the latest polling came out) discussing how, contrary to popular belief, Obama’s numbers were declining because of his “move to the center” on foreign policy/civil liberties issues. I had some sparsely-discussed polling data that backed me up pretty strongly, even. (As an aside, why is it that the “centrist” position on foreign policy is a default position of interventionism abroad, while a default position of non-interventionism is considered the position only of the “extreme” right and “extreme” left? Doesn’t this get things exactly backwards?). What seems to have been happening the last several days, however – and maybe I’m wrong since my attention to the convention has been pretty minimal – is that Obama has been somewhat moving back to a more typically liberal position on foreign policy. Regardless, my theory stands – the MSM perception that Obama was faltering because he was perceived as “too liberal” was ridiculous given that, during that period of time, it was universally agreed that he was trying to appear more centrist.

Personally, I would love to see the Obama of the early primaries return – the Obama that was pure liberal with respect to foreign policy and civil liberties, and relatively pro-market (by Dem standards). I would even consider switching my vote back to him if he did that. And so, I suspect, would a lot of other people who like me are neither liberals nor conservatives. And that’s my bigger point, which I’ve been banging on for awhile now: moving to the “center” is not good politics, despite conventional wisdom, because the “center” is a meaningless term that provides no description of what “moderates,” “independents,” or other free agent voters actually think. This isn’t to say that Obama should move to the “Left” on all issues to lock up the election. Instead, it is to say that politicians – at least on the national, massively publicized level – are more likely to win when they are sincere than they are to win when they pander or “move to the center.” Pandering doesn’t persuade many people to vote for you because, well, they just won’t trust that you’re telling the truth (and, besides, as we discussed awhile back, who wants to buy RC Cola when Coke already has the market cornered ? You’re better off being Dr. Pepper). It can, however, cost you the votes of people who already supported you because it undermines their trust of you. One thing people tend to be pretty good at doing is sniffing out insincerety; so a politician who gets a lot of press coverage is usually better off simply being sincere. Obama’s sincerety won him those early primaries over the candidate perceived as insincere, even though he was perceived at the time as the less liberal candidate in some respects; how things play out from here on will, I think, be a function of how well he and his campaign remember that lesson.