Seems about right [Bryan]

Who is President Obama? Ezra Klein has the answer:

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

This seems right to me, and you could point to many other examples, like immigration policy, foreign policy, and educational policy, where Obama leans right of center. This is why the spasm of hatred and vehemence that Obama has brought out on the right has always baffled me. It underscores the point that your politics has little to do with your policy preferences. It is more like a football game, more to do, that is, with whether "your side" is winning or losing.