How Left-Wing is Obama?

America is engaged in a dual-track conversation about the President's core beliefs. Conservatives by and large express conviction that he is a fervent radical, certainly a socialist, perhaps a Marxist - even (in the telling of the old Glenn Beck TV show) a Maoist!

Self-described leftists, on the other hand, write things like this:

If activists on the left want to alter this reality, they will have to figure out how to redefine the old ideal of economic justice for the age of the Internet and relentless geographic mobility. During the last election, many hoped that the organizing around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign would do just that. Yet, since taking office, Mr. Obama has only rarely made an effort to move the public conversation in that direction.

That is Michael Kazin, writing in the New York Times on Sunday. That regretful tone is the best treatment President Obama gets from the American left. More often he is on the receiving end of accusations of betrayal - or of never in the first place having had convictions to betray.

Conservatives do sometimes take cognizance of this left-wing disappointment/anger at the president. Some will even cite left-wing complaints as one more proof that the president is a miserable failure. Yet no matter how loud the accusations grow, they never shake the rock-hard conservative certitude of the president's hard-left ideological commitment.

There's material here for a study someday of the mysterious process by which people arrive at their certitudes.