Andrew Sullivan can’t really honestly believe this, can he?:
And after Romney’s convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.
Given his long-standing worship, adulation, and love of Obama, Sullivan has become absolutely unhinged lately as Obama diminishes himself and his presidency before our eyes. But Obama is still the favorite and Sullivan is a smart man. And so it is hard to believe that this election campaign won’t take more twists and turns. And it is even harder to believe a student of political history could make this claim about a party that is still very much within the 40 yard lines of American politics led by a candidate known for RomneyCare and beating up the president for cutting Medicare! A real radical that former governor from the Tea Party hotbed of Massachusetts.
And couldn’t one claim that Obama, Pelosi, and the Dems are the ones who have introduced the biggest and most radical changes in our government since the Great Society? (BTW, I don’t assume that radical policy change is necessarily a bad thing)
PILEUS 
It will be interesting to see what happens to polls, esp in swing states, if a) Ryan cleans Biden’s clock; b) there is a big audience (esp in Rust Belt states that are probably most sympathetic to both of these guys). It could set up an interesting narrative of the bumbling vs. the bright.
Obama and Pelosi as most radical politicians? Really? I can certainly think of some Bush era creations that are certainly far more radical than anything Obama ever did.
Ok, let’s hear em? Iraq? Not really radical given the direction of American foreign policy since about 1898. Gitmo? Well, Obama has called Bush and raised him on these types of things in the GWOT.
Wouldn’t Gitmo be the radical creation of the Bush era, with Obama building on the “new normal” created by Bush? In the same way that Nixon and even Reagan (the Social Security deal, frex) were just building on the “new normal” created by FDR and LBJ when it came to the social welfare system?
In this case, the major radical change I see in Obama’s first term is the health care bill, with the stimulus being a rather mundane standard reaction. And is the health care bill that radical considering what was already in place?
Free Dem makes a good point about Gitmo – but that doesn’t strike me as that significant compared to Obama’s radical ventures: asserting the right to kill American citizens without due process, using force without consulting Congress (one could argue he is building off the long legacy of Executive grasping but this takes it to a new level), and the individual mandate’s radical extension of state power (no matter what Justice Roberts thinks about it). I’m no lover of the Bush regime, either btw.
Looks like Reason caught up to the story too and echoes what I said: “What “imprinted first image” is he talking about? He’s gotten so upset about Obama’s debate performance (a week later) that it’s unclear what he even means. For whom was this debate their first impression of Obama? And the idea that the increasingly fractured Republican Party is “the most radical party in the modern era” is amusingly absurd. Their candidate invented ObamaCare and worries about “garage-based businesses” not being regulated by the government. If only the GOP actually were radical.”
For Sullivan hyperbole in his writing is directly proportional to his assessment of Obama’s likelihood to lose the election. The irrationality of his claims is truly laughable. Then again, when has he not written as the stereotypical overwrought, hyper-emotional gay man? He is in part known, famous even, for these emotion laden outbursts. For the life of me I cannot figure out why anyone still reads him and why he would be paid to write.