Obama Does Rolling Stone

Read the Rolling Stone interview with President Obama then come back and tell me what you thought.

My main takeaway is that Obama’s campaign strategy will be to call the Republican party and its nominee out for moving way beyond the mainstream. He’s going to say, a lot, that Reagan and even John McCain fail current GOP purity tests; that the GOP is obstructionist and more interested in defeating Obama than in having policies that are good for the country. He’s looked at polling on the environment, income inequality, Wall Street, dismantling the national safety net and collective bargaining rights and decided he can easily defeat Romney by showing independents that Mitt doesn’t represent them on any of those issues. He’s right too, he can.

However on specifics that matter to the DFH base, he’s going to dissapoint again. There’ll be no outright backing for equality in marriage or decriminalization of marijuana, no deep and wide policy on climate change. There will be a continuation of neoliberal interventionist foreign policies and the Keystone pipeline project. He’s going to make some nice noises on all of these in an attempt to placate that base, but a second term will be business-as-usual.

Update. Secondary assignment. Marco Rubio is one of the hot favorites to be Romney’s VP pick. Read Rubio’s keynote foreign policy speech delivered at Brookings today and tell me what, if anything, couldn’t have come from Obama’s mouth. The neo-whatever bipartisan consensus on US foreign policy and the primacy of the military hammer is ironclad. Sigh.

Update 2. I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.