In a news analysis piece on President Obama’s State of the Union address, The New York Times‘s Richard Stevenson spoke with editor Michael Tomasky about Obama and liberalism.

Stevenson writes:

He has adopted ideas, like the individual mandate at the heart of his health insurance overhaul, that originated among conservative thinkers. He has sought to impose greater accountability on teachers and schools for the quality of education; on Tuesday night he announced that the federal government would begin issuing scorecards for colleges assessing educational value relative to cost.

“In his somewhat incremental way, I do think Obama is redefining liberalism and relocating the center of American politics well to the left of where it’s been since Ronald Reagan’s time,” said Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy and a leading liberal thinker.

“It’s his instinct not to be an ideological warrior but to be an ideological mediator,” Mr. Tomasky said. “And yet, in performing those acts of ideological mediation I think he’s renewed liberalism and made it more acceptable to people who might have rejected it.”

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