Something has been nagging at me for days, and it took a column by E.J. Dionne in today’s Washington Post to crystalize my thinking.

Dionne asks, is the progressive Left disappointed in Barack Obama, a month before his inauguration, for not being Left enough?

At the same time, I’ve noticed the belief on the Right that Obama will usher in an era of Socialism, forever destroying the fabric of American liberties and society.

I’m mystified by both positions, honestly.

Obama’s Cabinet picks strike me as being generally centrist. Despite the frequent Republican meme in the general election that Obama was “the most liberal member of the Senate,” it was never true; Hillary Clinton ran to his left in the primaries, Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders have more …

Last night in the Vice Presidential debate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin closed her remarks with a quotation of Ronald Reagan:

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

Paul Krugman gives background to this idea of Reagan’s — it was from a record he recorded to defeat the passage of Medicare in 1961. …