People need to stop thinking of Obama as a lefty-liberal President. The political center in America has skewed so far to the furthest reaches of the right, a centrist liberal will tend to look like he’s way out on the leftist side of things. Obama is a left-leaning centrist, and he always has been. Americans really need to calibrate their political spectrum, if they honestly think Obama is a far left-winger. They also need to pay some attention to the political spectrum around the world, because in a great many places, Obama would be considered a conservative.

Case in point: If Obama really were a far leftist, he’d be banging heads among his own party members, and we’d be headed for a single-payer universal health care system. Instead, he’s trying to make everyone happy and bring everyone on board, which is exactly what a centrist does. Far left/right-wingers do whatever the hell they like when they are in power … bipartisanship be damned. Negotiation with all parties is the mark of a centrist.

And it’s no surprise Obama’s approval rating keeps creeping down either. If a polling group called me today and asked my opinion, I’d say I disapprove of what he’s doing. As I recall, he was going to bring affordable health care to everyone, end the wars and bring our boys home, and close Gitmo. These things aren’t happening, and they look unlikely to happen anytime in the near future, because he insists on working with the minority party who has firmly planted their feet in concrete and will never vote to get any of these things done.

Obama needs to be working on his own party and getting their act together. The American people gave them the majority power, and we expected them to use it to get these things done. Stop bothering to put out the fires caused by the opposing faction’s lies and half-truths, let the Republicans and their supporters stamp their feet and scream “NO!” all day long, and just get the stuff done they said they would get done. Obama and the Democrats could take some lessons from Bush on this matter. It didn’t seem to bother the Republicans when there were hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets screaming “NO!” to going to war in Iraq, but they went ahead and did it anyway, didn’t they?

Obama and the Democrats need to grow some balls.