BELLEVUE – President Barack Obama has more profoundly affected American society than angry liberals give him credit for, says one of the country’s most prominent conservative pundits.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer was here Wednesday to give the keynote address at the Washington Policy Center’s annual dinner. Before his sold-out speech, the FOX News analyst and syndicated writer met with several, mostly conservative, political bloggers for an open-ended discussion.

I asked Krauthammer how it could be that conservatives view President Barack Obama as a socialist while liberals – including many in Seattle – are disappointed that Obama has continued many of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy initiatives and opted for health care reform that was viewed as too friendly to private business.

“I think they (liberals) do not appreciate how historic his presidency has already been for American liberalism. If his presidency were to end tomorrow, Obamacare alone would be the most significant social change since the Great Society, perhaps since the New Deal,” Krauthammer said. “I think the liberals underappreciate what actually happened with Obamacare. To put it in a nutshell, what has essentially happened is the insurance industry has gone from an independent operator to a utility, with the same kind of government control over revenue and expenditures over the health care industry, health care insuranc…So it’s become a middle man for government health care. And I do think that in a while – let’s assume he has a second term – after he’s gone I think the country…will come to a point where we say, ‘Why do we need the middle man?’ And it’ll be eliminated, because it’s simply inefficient. If the government’s going to run it, why through an insurance industry, which is duplication? I think, unless it’s repealed, I think Obamacare will be a milestone on an inexorable road to national health care. If you’re on the left, you know that’s what Obama wanted in the first place. He didn’t abandon it on principal, he abandoned it on pragmatic grounds. You can’t get there in one fell swoop. And I think he’s done it very brilliantly this way…(The left) wanted to go all the way in one step with the public option, the point is you don’t need the public option. The insurance industry is the public option.”

Other points:

The Pulitzer Prize winner says liberals upset that Obama hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay don’t understand what he faces. “It’s easy to be the ACLU if you’re on the outside. If you’re president and … our security is at stake … you do what you have to do … I think he was sincere in wanting to get rid of Guantanamo. He gets into office, he looks around, that’s why it’s still open.”

Krauthammer, who has a degree in psychiatry, rejected the notion advanced in a controversial Forbes article that the president’s “anti-colonial” worldview stems from his Kenyan father. “Once you try to make the psychological link – which is one of the reasons I left psychiatry is I really don’t believe that we have any great scientific insight into how early childhood relates to adulthood … – the idea that he somehow incorporated the world view of a father he never knew, is to me quite odd. So, I would say if you want to describe his view of the world as that kind, I would say it’s more of the American academic left, if he got it anywhere that’s where he picked up – Columbia and Harvard, with his Hyde Park friends. He did not pick it up in the cradle, I don’t think.”

He’s not sure Republican Dino Rossi can win a U.S. Senate seat in the Democratic stronghold that is Washington state. “It looked to me like Rossi was neck and neck. It seems to me that (Sen. Patty) Murray is opening up a slight lead. It could be the nature of the electorate. These are very blue states. In a tsunami election, yes, they get wiped out. It may not be a tsunami.”