“I believe in a whole lot of things that make me progressive and put me squarely in the Democratic camp,” he said. But, he noted, he does not believe that the active hand of government is a replacement, say, for parental responsibility in education.
“I believe in personal responsibility, I also believe in faith,” he said. “That’s not something new; I’ve been talking about that for years. So the notion that this is me trying to look” – he waves his hands around his head – “centrist is not true.”
Mr. Obama, in fact, has written and spoken in favor of a role for religious institutions in the provision of social services, and in his book “The Audacity of Hope” he appeared to endorse the death penalty for child rapists.
As for gun control, Obama said he long has believed that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to bear arms. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t think we need decent controls” on guns, he said. “Those two positions are not contradictory.”
Mr. Obama has been far less clear about his views on the Washington, D.C. gun ban. As recently as four months ago, he seemed to speak in favor of the law; two weeks ago, however, he seemed to applaud Supreme Court ruling without precisely saying so.
He also spoke to the lurking danger for any candidate who stands accused of abandoning or trimming core beliefs: Voters grow uneasy about the candidate’s identity. This problem greatly afflicted Republican Mitt Romney in the Republican primary earlier this year, when that candidate appeared to re-brand himself and his beliefs with each passing week.
“One of the things you find as you go through this campaign, everyone becomes so cynical about politics,” Mr. Obama said. There is an “assumption that your must be doing everything for political reasons.”
Voters should understand, he said, that they rarely will find themselves in 100 percent agreement with him. “But don’t assume that’s because I’m just doing it for “political reasons, he said.
“That just means we disagree,”
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