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Chris Anderson:

If Obama wins on November 4th (as appears likely), the post election spin war will be furious (it always is). Part of what will determine its course will be the framing that was used prior to the election. By painting Obama as as "the most liberal Senator", in favor "spreading the wealth", and as a closet socialist, the conservatives have legitimized the argument that the electorate wants more liberalism, more "spreading the wealth", and even (horror of horrors) more socialism.

Liberals of my acquaintance have been arguing for more than a year that this election needed to be about more than just Bush. It needed to be a repudiation of conservative Reaganomics and Rovian political tricks. Obama and others (as Ambinder notes) have attempted to do this, with little success. But the Republicans, by making an ideological attack, have made the argument for us.

Thanks for the assist.

Certainly, if this comes to pass, it will be because the Right has helped. But let's turn it around: Obama has not given them an opening to attack him successfully because he's explicitly rejected the labels of left and right. This, of course, has driven some liberals crazy, because they want to confront and defeat conservatism.

Obama is arguing for progressive policies without calling them progressive. He's trying to make the case that they accomplish the end they are designed to accomplish, that they work, and the ideological pigeonhole they fit into is secondary or even irrelevant. This is, frankly, the only way to sell them to a skeptical public. People who have never considered themselves ideological in their whole lives - probably a plurality of the electorate - are not going to go into the voting booth on November 4 and say to themselves, "I think I am a progressive now." They are going to vote for the guy who they think has the plan which will work.

Conservatives won by demonizing liberals and painting themselves as champions of virtue and strength. Some liberals want to simply turn that around and prove that we're the virtuous ones. (Because we are!) Obama has a different approach: Associate the Democratic party with the instinct of independent voters; namely, that ideology is bunk. Of necessity, Obama is saying that the government can help make things better, which makes him a progressive. But he's not saying conservatism is always and everywhere wrong, just that it has failed. In doing so, I think, he is repositioning the Democratic Party as the party of the center of American public opinion.

If that's right, it is a very shrewd move, and one that might well and truly wreck the conservative movement. With the Republicans helping, how can he fail?