If Obama is too conservative, why are so many candidates running away from him and to the right?

[Cali_Democrat]

Look at what's happening in a large number of districts across the country....everywhere from Louisiana to Kentucky.

the vast majority of Dems seeking election this fall in contested areas are running away from Obama and running to the right. When it comes to issues like clean energy and immigration, these candidates are echoing the GOP and disagreeing with Obama. Hell, one candidate won't even say if she voted for Obama.

Yet when one reads DU and other websites, there are a number of people who say Obama is actually too conservative.

Shouldn't that mean candidates should be running to the left of Obama and not to the right? Why echo GOP talking points?

What gives?

Is this country moving to the right? I think that might be the case unfortunately.

[Vincardog]

1. The Pols are running to get the $$$$$$$$ from a few RW nutz with a LOT of Money.

[gordianot]

2. Try 8 years of constant smears often racist.

[Kalidurga]

3. Obama isn't conservative

being a pro-corporation capitalist doesn't make a person conservative any more than being pro legalization for drugs would make someone a liberal.

[wavesofeuphoria]

23. +1

[progressoid]

33. Being a pro-corp capitalist certainly doesn't score him any liberal points.

[Kalidurga]

34. Absolutely right

But, he is very far from a social conservative. I will take that over a feudalist RWer who is also socially conservative and cares only about driving the working poor to even more extreme poverty.

[1StrongBlackMan]

39. What is promoting ...

an increase in the minimum wage, extensions to U/C, Pay Check Fairness and jobs through infrastructure repair being a pro-corp capitalist?

[arcane1]

4. Running to the right is, sadly, something Dems have been doing for far too long

[Union Scribe]

5. Because they're *way* too conservative?

Imagine how far they'd run from someone who didn't describe himself as a 1980s moderate Republican?

[Cali_Democrat]

6. They're idiots

Almost as bad as those ignorant fucksticks who think Ebola is going to spread like wildfire across the USA.

[Erose999]

7. They're courting the vote of very vocal white male rightwingers who will never, ever vote for them

in the first place.

The RW superpacs and big money donors are flooding the airwaves with RW ads and thats pushed the discourse to the right, unfortunately. The Dem candidates are just going with the flow instead of trying to swim against it.

[Populist_Prole]

20. Yeah, pretty much

Based on the wingnuts I'm surrounded by. They're tribalistic as all get-out. No candidate, regardless of their actual stances could ever be far right enough as long as they have a "D" after their name.

[RKP5637]

31. Many democrats are gutless! Democrats running for office should stand for the values of the

democratic party and stand firm. They might find they get more support than running after those moving rightward like a bunch of wimps!!!

[Cali_Democrat]

32. +1000

[bananas]

8. Even Obama said he'd be a Republican in the 1980s

He's the kind of person we used to vote against.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2961768

[1StrongBlackMan]

40. I keep reading that indictment ...

but absent the advent of time travel, I don't see that as particularly relevant to today's debate. The parties are where the people that elected them are ... just like the parties were where the people of yester-year were.

[leftstreet]

9. How else can they run on 'change?'

Obama and the Democrats have pretended to be progressives. The GOP accused them of being 'liberal' and 'progressive.' The labeling stuck

There's no place else for them to go to at least make an appearance of wanting 'change'

[Cali_Democrat]

13. If the GOP labels them as liberal and progressive, isn't that a good thing? nt

[Fumesucker]

14. After the Republicans spent the last three plus decades demonizing liberals?

Plenty of people want to see more liberal policies who would never dream of voting for a "liberal" because they are a liberal.

[Cali_Democrat]

16. So then what can be done if plenty of people would never dream of voting for a liberal? nt

[Fumesucker]

19. Run candidates that are painted on the left side of the Republicans of course

Just so long as the paint isn't too thick.

[progressoid]

35. If they actually pursued liberal and progressive agenda, then yes.

But accepting their definition of moderates and centrists as liberals moves us further to the right.

[Cali_Democrat]

36. Well...looking at the polls...

It appears the American voters actually want to move the country to the right by voting in Republicans.

[progressoid]

37. Yep. it's been trending that way for the last 30 years.

Today's repubs are the John Birchers of my youth.

And on our side, many of the ideals of the Democratic Party of my youth are now ignored and even fought against by our own people.

[JI7]

17. so why are they embracing Clintons ?

[leftstreet]

25. Kickstarting her campaign for her? I dunno n/t

[Tarheel_Dem]

10. Ssshhhh! You're not supposed to mention the obvious. I did, and was severely chastised by one of..

the more strident Obama "critics" for even suggesting such a thing. It's H-E-R-E-S-Y to even propose that the world outside of DU may not be a vast liberal utopia, but for that "gay hugging corporatist" Obama, and the rest of his "Turdway" cohorts.

[Aristus]

12. "From Louisiana to Kentucky" That's it right there.

President Obama represents to many white Southerners ( including some nominal Democrats) everything they hate and despise; everything they feel they have "lost" - the Lost Cause. When the good guys abolished slavery, the bad guys had to get up off their lazy white asses and put in an honest day's work for a change. Right-wing radio hate-jockeys have been bloviating for years that all black people are welfare cheats sitting around collecting paychecks for doing nothing. That doesn't sit well with some backwoods grease monkey who can't get ahead no matter how hard he works. He'd rather believe the things conservative politicians are telling him, than exert a little brain power to see that it's the rich right-wingers who are keeping him down, and not African-Americans, embodied in the President they hate so much.

[Chathamization]

15. Because of our conservative media, who love fear mongering about the deficit, inflation,

supposed military weakness, and supposedly high taxes. The people who told the American public that the ACA was a failure a year ago, and are silent now that it’s working better than expected, who told US that there was a major scandal where the IRS was targeting conservatives. The people who said that the government shutdown was the fault of both sides, and that there is a debate over global warming. The people who ten years ago told us that homophobia was moral and who encouraged us to invade Iraq.

When people say that a candidate is too liberal too win, it’s not because they’re too liberal for the voting public (opinion polls show that the public generally agree with progressive policies). They mean that anyone not conservative enough for the media will be publicly ridiculed and mocked. Remember what they did to a moderate like Dean.

Of course, people should ask themselves why they keep listening to people who consistently lie to them.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

18. Not every state's voters are the same.

In blood-red states, even a middle-right candidate isn't 'right' enough. You have to out-conservative even other conservatives.

It's why even strongly conservative Republicans have lost Congressional primaries over the last few cycles.

[Cali_Democrat]

21. But in order to win elections and win congress, you have to win some of these districts

That inevitably means you get people like Max Baucus who will block liberal legislation/initiatives in Congress.

[hfojvt]

22. places like Kentucky, Kansas, South Dakota and Montana

to name just a few with Senate races this year, they do not need to move to the right. They are already to the right of most of the country and to the right of Obama.

But the average DUer is to the left of Obama.

[Zorra]

24. My Dem candidate for the House is the only person I know who may be even farther left

than me.

[randys1]

26. Not about politics, color of skin 99%.

But to the extent that it is about politics, the average mainstream conservative Democrat or republican has no clue about the issues, is unaware of just how wrong the right is about absolutely everything.

[JoePhilly]

27. Cause they live in the real world.

And not the DU bubble, where if every Dem candidate does not sound like Bernie Sanders, they should be shunned.

[louis-t]

28. Good point.

I love DU.

[unrepentant progress]

29. Obama is not a conservative

Obama is a neoliberal technocrat.

It helps if you have more than two words in your political vocabulary.

[DeadEyeDyck]

30. short term gain at the price of long term party damage

[BKH70041]

38. Are you allowed to even say that on this board?

Maybe it depends on who you are rather than what you're saying. Regardless, it's good somebody said it.

Let me take it a step further.

If you had a line from (-10) to +10, with (-10) being politically the far left, +10 being politically the far right, and zero being the center, about 99% of the members of this board would be somewhere in the neighborhood of minus 999 centillion.