DURING the dog days of last summer’s debt ceiling negotiations, with Washington gridlocked and the president’s approval ratings slumping, a narrative coalesced among disappointed liberals. President Obama was failing, they decided, because he was too moderate, too reasonable and too conciliatory. He didn’t have the ideological confidence required to actually fight for liberalism, or the brazenness required to really tear the Republicans apart.

Apparently somebody at the White House bought into this narrative, because so far Obama’s re-election campaign has delivered just about everything that liberal partisans were begging for a year ago.

Since the campaign kicked off, the president’s domestic policy rhetoric has become much more stridently left-wing than it was during the debt-ceiling debate. He’s dropped all but a pro forma acknowledgment of the tough choices looming in our future, and doubled down on the comforting progressive fantasy that we can close the deficit and keep the existing safety net by soaking America’s millionaires and billionaires.

On hot-button cultural issues, meanwhile — immigration and gay marriage, reproductive issues and religious liberty, even welfare reform — he’s moved away from Clintonian triangulation, offering a succession of explicit panders to Democratic voting blocs and interest groups instead.