There has been a lot of discussion recently about Barack Obama's move to "the center." The concern as Ariana Huffington explains in a post on HuffPost is that by doing so Obama threatens to alienate his core supporters, legitimizes many of the right-wing policies that have bankrupted this nation, and most pressingly, this approach did not work for either Al Gore or John Kerry, Obama's predecessors as Democratic nominee.  Writing for the New York Times yesterday, Bob Herbert is even more critical:

But Senator Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.

Obama's move to the center is Clintonian in approach and it remains to be seen whether it will also be Clintonian in affect, thereby garnering him a November victory. What is surprising about Obama's decision to borrow from the Clinton playbook is that unlike Clinton who succeeded two Republican administrations, and battled a Rebuplican candidate in 1992, George H.W. Bush, who voters were merely agnostic about whether he stayed in office, unlike the current Bush who Obama would succeed, and who voters vehemently want out of office. Moreover, Clinton went toward the center because back then the right wing had strong and competent figures like James Baker, Bob Dole and Jesse Helms who were masterful at enacting a right wing agenda at home and abroad. Clinton knew that Dole and Helms would have an inordinate amount of sway in determining his fate, and while their allegiance to Bush Sr. was slim, their conviction to the principles of their party was not.

By contrast, one would be hard pressed to find a Republican figure who currently holds as much sway as the aforementioned Republicans. The most powerful right wing members in office these days are not even politicians, but instead are supreme court justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. Roberts and Scalia in particular have become more aware of their power and this past year opened up to the public in ways that they had not done earlier in their careers. Additionally, while Republicans walk around announcing themselves as conservatives like frat-boys enamored by their fraternities acronym, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas have become the right-wing's political conscience, and in so doing have set the stage for the Supreme Court to become more reflective of this nation's political conscience than either the legislative or executive branches of government.

Case in point in the last five years we have seen a President initiate an unjust war without any sensible debate, and last month we witnessed a presidential candidate undo his opponent's signature piece of legislation by simply sending an email out to his supporters announcing that he will not accept public campaign financing. On the other hand, we also took part in a judicious debate on Affirmative Action that while it repealed some of the program's initial gains, the inclusion of so many stakeholders in the process to determine the program's fate prevented a far worse outcome.

Bringing this back to Obama's move to the center, it is a risky strategy because so much of what was once termed "the right" is now ensconced in the supreme court. Senate conservatives are a gaggle of contradictions without a party leader capable of mobilizing them. Dubya's war upended republican tenets of fiscal conservatism, and unleashed a conservative movement that as Mitt Romney learned during this year's primary hinders the prospects of successful republican politicians who are not in line with the grossly over-hyped Christian right. Ironically, the only republican senator capable of making Obama or any other Democratic candidate veer to the center is John McCain. However instead of undoing some of the damage done by Bush and Karl Rove, McCain has decided to prostitute himself to Bush and Rove's backers thereby further delegitimizing this nation's right wing and their agenda. Writing for The New Republic, Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, have renamed McCain, "McContradiction," continuing a theme that has plagued the Republican nominee throughout his presidential bid.

McCain's desperate flailing for a conservative port to parachute into suggest that arguments proclaiming a right wing movement are not to be taken lightly during this campaign season. It also suggests that after twenty years of seeking to define themselves as centrists, democratic politicians would do well to recognize that save for flirtations with the Green Party, the left has not been mobilized to the same degree as their counterparts on the right in a general election, and were there any year to do this, this would be the year.