The New Yorker editor compares the current atmosphere in the U.S. to what happened in Israel under Yitzhak Rabin: the far right stirred things up so much that the political atmosphere became, literally, murderous.

Question: How far
left is Obama? David Remnick: I think the notion that
Barack Obama is a radical is preposterous. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who
is quoted in my book as saying that the only radical thing, the only
true radical thing about Barack Obama is that he's African-American. And
I think that's true. That his politics are center/center-left, they
come out
of the tradition of the Democratic Party. In many ways they are
continuations of lines taken by the Clinton Administration. You know,
look at the healthcare bill itself. This is a more modest healthcare
bill than many proposed by others. He got what he could get and he
succeeded. Look at the so-called radical nuclear arms treaty just signed
with the Russians. There's a lot of criticism on the right saying,
Barack Obama is giving away our security. He is stripping us of our
capacity to project strength in the world and to protect ourselves, and
in fact, the great left-winger Ronald Reagan was far more radical when
it came to nuclear arms policy. Remember, Rekjavik in the
period,
I think Gorbachev-Reagan period were those two men who were intent on
reducing nuclear stockpiles to nothing. And here we've reduced it by a
third. I mean, the notion that Barack Obama somehow came out of a
radical cauldron in Chicago and somewhere in his desk drawer, in the
Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is a copy of Marx and Gramsci and Lenin
is just obscene. It's ridiculous. And there are just too many elements
in the media and in politics trying to stoke these fires for those
absurd notions to disappear. Question: Will the
Republicans win in the midterm elections? David Remnick:
It's very difficult to see. Look, I think there is a legitimate
conservative opposition, as you would expect. Of course that's going to
happen. There's going to be a legitimate Republican opposition, there's
going to be battles. What concerns me is not that so much. What concerns
me deeply is the outer edges of it and the nature of the outer edges of
it, and the way the outer edges are provoked by certain politicians and

certain parts of the internet and television, cable television and all
the rest. And the end result of some of that kind of ugliness can be
beyond our reckoning; really beyond our reckoning. And I don't want to
be too alarmist of it, but I remember, for example, in Israeli politics
during Yitzhak Rabin's time, when the far right there stirred things up
to such a degree that the political atmosphere in certain quarter became
quite literally murderous. So, I think we need to be very
careful about lumping everybody together in, even the Tea Party
Movement. I might not agree with any of it, but the extremes of it are
really alarming. Recorded on April 9, 2010