Appearing by phone on Steve Malzberg‘s NewsMaxTV show Monday afternoon, Charles Krauthammer responded to Rush Limbaugh‘s criticism that the Washington Post columnist was “fooled” into believing President Obama was a “centrist” at the beginning of his first term in office.
On his radio show, Limbaugh ran clips of Krauthammer and fellow columnist George Will telling Fox News that they initially thought Obama painted himself as a compromising centrist. “I intellectually don’t know how you can not figure out Barack Obama,” the radio host said. “A liberal is a liberal. I know Obama, for the low-information crowd, could be whatever you wanted him to be –- a blank canvas — but, for crying out loud, we’re not talking about low-information people here.”
In response, Krauthammer said that certain “talk radio hosts” (read: Limbaugh) had misrepresented what he said in the Fox special. “They ought to listen to what I said,” he told Malzberg. “I said nothing of the sort. I said that when Obama was elected, it was not clear whether he was a centrist Democrat who would throw a bone to the left; or if he was a man of the left who would occasionally throw a bone to the center.”
“What I was trying to explain,” he continued, “is that after three hours of policy discussion [with the president], both myself and my colleagues had no better idea after, which is a way of saying how well he could disguise his beliefs.”
However, Krauthammer said, “it didn’t take long to figure out his political ideology,” during Obama’s “radical” address to a Joint Session of Congress.
“I’ve had no illusions about Barack Obama from the beginning,” the conservative writer added. “The point I was making is that he was trying to disguise his political ideology and how far left he was when he ran in ’08. But he let down the mask as soon as he got elected.”
Asked whether Limbaugh is “wrong” for his thoughts then, Krauthammer said, “I don’t listen to what they have said. I have no idea. I’ve actually been working today.”
“It’s not what I have said,” he concluded, “or what I have ever written.”
Watch below, via NewsMaxTV:
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