Thread by @DouthatNYT

A couple of points in response to this @ed_kilgore essay. First, I didn't talk about Obama specifically in the column he cites, but my basic view is that Obama ran as a cultural centrist in '08 and then abandoned that ground across his presidency.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

The Obama '08 campaign did serious outreach to evangelicals and Catholics, talked about common ground on abortion, took an enforcement-first position on immigration, etc.

By 2012 the WH seemed to have given up on that approach. The Obamacare/abortion debate and then the HHS mandate fight kneecapped pro-life Dems, and the WH shifted into "war on women" mode, scoffing at religious-liberty anxieties, picking fights with Catholic bishops, etc.

Then the second term, in part bc Obama was balked on econ policy, was thick with efforts to use bureaucracy to advance cultural liberalism combined with a liberal (in both senses) use of executive power on immigration.

Which dovetailed w/a larger cultural "awokening," in campus activism/BLM/Samantha Bee-fication of pop culture -- and then was followed by a Hillary Clinton campaign that wrote off pro-life/evangelical voters, to the dismay of BHO's faith adviser:
washingtonpost.com/posteverything…

These shifts weren't confined to the left; they were connected to a larger culturally-liberal shift in the nation as a whole. And I agree w/Kilgore that on SSM, Dem politicians trailed that shift till 2012 or so. But ...

... in general between Obama's 2008 campaign and HRC's 2016 run there was a pretty big shift from courting religious and cultural conservatives to writing them off and banking on the new coalition. And over the same period the Dems did not win more elections; they won fewer.

This seems like pretty strong circumstantial evidence that liberalism's leaders, political and cultural, have moved left faster than the country. Especially since -- here, again, I agree with Kilgore -- the GOP wasn't making a bid for the cultural center over this period either.

A genuinely culturally-centrist Democratic Party would have crushed Donald Trump. He was not crushed, therefore Kilgore's confidence in his party's centrism seems misplaced. I am certainly guilty of returning to my hobbyhorses -- but I also think I'm right.