Michael Lind Tells the Truth

Obama should run as a Republican because the neoliberal ideas he espouses run contrary to traditional Democratic or liberal ideas.

Of course, if the GOP did run him instead of Romney or somebody else, they would lose the election.

How's this for insults to the president?

If Obama chose to run for reelection not as a Democrat but as a moderate Republican, he could bring about two healthy transformations in the American political system. The moderate wing of the Republican Party could be restored. And the Democratic presidential nomination might be opened up to politicians from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

In the last generation, the old-fashioned moderate Republicans from New England and the Midwest symbolized by Nelson Rockefeller have been driven out of the GOP by the conservative followers of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Streaming into the Democratic Party as voters, and buying it with ample Wall Street cash as donors, this upscale elite has changed the party from a populist liberal alliance of unionized workers and populists into a socially liberal, economically conservative version of the old country-club Republicanism of the pre-Reagan era. The transformation began under Jimmy Carter, accelerated under Bill Clinton and has nearly been completed under Barack Obama. This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. It is your grandfather’s Republican Party of 1955.

I'd say today's "Democratic Party" is the Republican Party of 1980. Obama is a big admirer of Reagan, after all. The party has embraced discredited and debunked neoliberal ideas that are right out of the Chicago School playbook.