Old New Democrat

Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber say that while President Obama isn't out to alter the fundamental structures of American capitalism, he's not a Bill Clinton-style moderate, either:

Obama has set out to synthesize the New Democratic faith in the utility of markets with the Old Democratic emphasis on reducing inequality. In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers.