joining me is jonathan alter, and alex wagner. john, you have a lot of history under your belt. this guy's a progressive, the stimulus package was pure keynesian ecomic pure roosevelt. it was aggressive industrial policy, and clearly the health care bill, the first since truman to deliver on a longtime progressive goal. then to afghanistan where he went right of the middle. he's sticking in there in force, and the bush tax cuts where it's very hard to read why we have tax cuts in the well off. we still have bush's tax policy. is the shot he's too conservative from the left right? >> i don't think it is. liberals have to be careful about making these kinds of charges when hubert humphrey was too centrist for them, they sat on their hands in 1968, and we got nixon. when carter was too centrist, we got the teddy kennedy challenge which helped sink him in 1980, so you have to look at the record. the record is most lid quite progressive until his reaction to the mitt terms. then he made a conscious decision to move abruptly to the center to start talking more about deficit reduction,