Look, Obama is not now a liberal, nor a progressive. He was not a liberal five years ago, and won’t be one five years from now. All this despite his, “Most Liberal Senator in the US” label from The National Journal. He’s not more liberal than Russ Feingold, and by comparison with Bernie Sanders he’s positively right wing.

Barack Obama is a centrist. In terms of policy stances there’s not a pubic hair’s difference between him and Hillary Clinton. Nobody with two functional neurons would call HRC a liberal. (The two functional neurons rules out Bill O’Liely, Plush Limpaw and all the other brain-dead characters on Reich-Wing talk radio/TV.) Obama isn’t a liberal, and his cabinet choices prove it.

If Obama were a liberal, we’d see serious talk how we will transition to single-payor health care. Things like whose model we should follow — France? Spain? Not the UK, for sure. Sweden? Switzerland? Absolutely not Canada (though in fairness, the Canadian system is grossly distorted by our existence across the border. They can get away with underfunding their system because enough Canadians get pissed off about things and come south for care. On the other hand, we are seeing some of that here — people who can’t afford care in the US cross the border into Mexico for care they can afford. Dental care is big, probably because Medicare doesn’t do dental.)

If Obama were a liberal, we’d be hearing about how we’re going to reduce our military expenditures. The United States military budget is almost as large as the rest of the world’s, combined. ($1.44 Trillion for the world, $711 Billion for the US) Why do we need military expenditures that large? Why do we need maintain more than 5000 thermonuclear warheads? We’d be discussing how those military resources are going to be converted into diplomatic and civilian uses.

If Obama were a liberal, we’d be hearing about what is going to be done to halt the transfer of wealth from middle class to the plutocracy.

Obama is a centrist. That’s not necessarily bad … FDR was a centrist too. We can get some (not all) of these things, but we have to make him to them. We won’t be seeing Obama pushing hard on many of these things.

Obama’s model for getting to single payor health care finance is incremental — get closer to universal coverage, then allow the government-sponsored plans to supplant private coverage.

This was the approach that was advocated when Medicare was implemented. We’ll get health care for seniors, and for poor folks (Medicaid). We’ll expand coverage from there, and by date XXXX (the date cited varied, depending on who was doing the guesswork) we’ll have a single payor system. And we won’t have to go through the pain of creating one to supplant the previous system.

Well, it’s 2008. Do we have single payor yet? Not a chance. Every time progressive forces pushed to expand Medicare down, the reactionary right quashed it. With the sole exception of SChIP, attempts to expand government-sponsored coverage from below have also failed. SChIP has been successful, but how much has it expanded in the last years of Bush? That’s right, not on the Federal level, some at the State level through waivers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

We need to figure out our priorities (the Employee Free Choice Act is a good one, the biggest expansion of Medicare coverage down in age possible is another good one) and push hard to get them through Congress. Obama will sign them, he may even take credit for them.

But the heavy lifting is ours to do, don’t count on leadership from Obama on liberal issues.

And I’m tired of hearing about how Obama’s not a liberal. Some of us knew that a year ago, two years ago. But it was also true that if Obama were really a liberal he’d still be Senator Obama and not President-Elect Obama.