Just don't call Barack Obama liberal, okey doke?
AUSTIN, Texas - In his radio and TV ads that are blanketing Texas, Barack Obama claims a chief executive can make more money "in 10 minutes" than an ordinary worker makes in a year. Obama wants to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, enact a national health plan, offer a $4,000-a-year tuition reimbursement in exchange for national service, and have the government intervene to prevent home foreclosures.
But he doesn't want anyone to call him a liberal.
For despite Obama's vow to build a working majority for change - to win a clear mandate for his progressive agenda, rather than engage in Clinton-like "triangulation" - he's not yet willing to own the l-word.
Obama seems to have calculated that such labels can be distracting - that some voters have negative associations with the term liberal that obscures their support for such Democratic priorities as affordable healthcare and higher education for all.
He may be right. But his reluctance to own the term in a forthright way is somewhat surprising because Obama has said he wants to be a transformative figure like Ronald Reagan, whose crusade against liberals and big government has dominated American political discourse for almost 30 years.
And the purest proof of Reagan's continuing success is the fact that Republican candidates this year have been tripping over themselves to assume the label of "conservative," while Democrats continue to duck and cover when liberalism is mentioned.
Now that John McCain, who reacted to questions about his conservatism as if they were questions about his manhood, has all but secured the GOP nod, he's been trying to cast Obama as a liberal. The National Journal recently obliged by publishing a survey declaring Obama the most liberal senator. The survey itself was highly subjective - based on a limited number of recent votes - but it nonetheless pegged Obama as a liberal.
On Friday, Obama responded - by denying it.
One of the more appealing innovations of Obama's campaign is the way the candidate ends his stump speeches by running through the arguments against him: too young, too new, too naive, too trusting. Speaking before thousands of cheering young supporters in the Texas capitol, Obama added another: too liberal.
"Oh, he's liberal, he's liberal," Obama said, mimicking his critics. "Let me tell you something. There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics. That is common sense. There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home . . . . There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare. We are spending more on healthcare in this country than any other advanced country, but we've got more uninsured. There's nothing liberal about saying that doesn't make sense, and we should so something smarter with our healthcare system."
Obama has invented a phrase for actions that smack of politics-as-usual: okey-doke. Of the liberal charge, Obama thundered: "Don't let them run that 'okey doke' on you."
He's right, of course, that Republicans have turned liberalism, the philosophy that dominated politics from the '30s until the '80s, into a term of insult. But Obama might have pointed out that it's really no slur - in fact, tens of millions of Americans readily own up to being liberals, according to polls. Obama just isn't one of them.
Bill Burton, his national campaign spokesman, suggests that Obama isn't rejecting liberalism so much as labeling.
"I think he's been pretty clear on this, as he's laid out from his '04 convention speech until now, that these attempts to divide Americans by these old labels are counterproductive," he said. "There may be people on the left side of the spectrum and people on the right side of the spectrum, but they all want to change America."
Of course, Obama has always had the option of identifying himself as a liberal and then rejecting the GOP tactic of labeling. In other contexts, Obama has been outspoken about condemning the use of scapegoats in politics, from blacks to gays to Mexicans. And he surely doesn't mean to imply that anyone should refuse to acknowledge being black or gay or Mexican.
But liberalism dare not speak its name. In this case, it's hard to tell whether Obama is rejecting a Washington "okey doke" or embracing one.
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. 