There seems to be an awful lot of confusion these days about a) whether Obama was a centrist or a left-leaning candidate, and b) what qualifies as a centrist or left-leaning policy. Take this article from the AP, helpfully titled "Liberals to keep pressure on Obama for results":

Now, this AP article may have put it in a particularly foolish way - but it is true to the implied thinking behind most of the mainstream media coverage of the transition: if Obama is to be a centrist, he must split the difference between his own campaign platform (which is obviously Liberal, because Liberals supported him) and the positions of those to the right of him - either the Republican Party or the rightward end of his own party, it's never quite clear.

Politico outlined another splitting-the-difference-as-good-policy formulation last week: policy as ego management. In a piece entitled "Team of Egos?" Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin wonder if Obama's real challenge will be managing the egos of his new team of Washington titans.

Obama, [Mary Matalin] said, can limit in-fighting by doing what past presidents have done: taking elements of his advisers' differing ideas to formulate his own policy.

"It's usually not 'a' or 'b,' but a synthesis," she said, recalling that the current president would often not uniformly take the advice of Cheney or former Secretary of State Colin Powell, but rather go "off the menu" and pick a third option.

Hmmm, yes. And we all saw how well that worked out. But former Bill Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta joins the chorus:

Panetta, similarly, praised Clinton's ability to weave together input from his sometimes-fractious team to limit bruised egos.

"He took all these different ideas, he mixed them together and came up with an approach that combined different pieces from all his advisers," said Panetta. "They all got something."

First of all, I don't think anyone likes the idea of U.S. policy being formulated as a sop to a bunch of egos in Washington. But more importantly, this displays a political conventional wisdom that the press for the most part uses - consciously or not - to frame its discussions of "centrism" - namely, that the best answer, both policy-wise and politically, always lies somewhere in between the arguments from whomever is representing the Right and the Left in a given discussion.

But the word "centrism" simultaneously invokes the idea of "pragmatism" - i.e., making decisions based on what's best for the country and what will work, instead of on a rigid ideology. Now, some may genuinely think that pragmatism = splitting the difference. But this conflation is largely a result of a lack of deep thinking, in my opinion.

Perhaps I am guilty, as so many Liberals are accused of being, of reading something into Obama's rhetoric that wasn't there. But I saw nothing in his campaign or temperament that suggested his solution to America's ills was to split the difference between the current Republican and Democratic establishments. We had that president already; his name was Bill Clinton - and Obama ran against the Clinton legacy in many ways. Rather, I took Obama's pragmatism to mean that he would look for the best ideas, regardless of where they came from. If a Republican or a conservative Democrat had a good idea, the idea itself is what would matter.

But that "if" is important. Sometimes, Obama will get a lot of conflicting advice from a lot of big-ego powerful people, and the best policy idea will be a traditionally liberal idea - or come from a liberal person. And if that's the best policy, one hopes that Obama will enact it, not combine everyone's ideas from all points on the spectrum just to manage egos and to be "centrist" for its own sake.

To quote Chris Hayes:

[The left] was right about Iraq, right about wage stagnation and inequality, right about financial deregulation, right about global warming and right about health care. And I don't just mean in that in a sectarian way. I mean to say that the emerging establishment consensus on all of these issues came from the left. There's tons of things the left is right about that aren't even close to mainstream (taking a hatchet to the national security state and ending the prison industrial complex to name just two), but hopefully we're moving there.

That's the point here. There are genuinely lefty things that no progressive in his right mind has any hope of seeing addressed in an Obama administration. But universal health care, not torturing people, stopping global warming, financial regulation...these are fundamentally centrist - i.e., pragmatic and widely-held - positions. The fact that they are considered lefty by much of the political and media establishment, and that centrism is too often poorly defined as splitting the difference, is what is causing pre-emptive but justifiable worry about Obama's hefty, ideologically diverse , but unquestionably brilliant and competent cabinet.