President Barack Obama is waxing nostalgic about his former rival, praising 2008 GOP nominee John McCain for his "centrism" at one of six taxpayer-sponsored fundraisers on Friday, according to travel press pool reports.
"We're going to have as stark a contrast as we've seen in a very long time between the two candidates. 2008 was a significant election, obviously. But John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. There were some areas where you saw some overlap."
"In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction. The center of gravity for their party has shifted."
He talked of deficit reduction and said, "We couldn't get them to take yes for an answer."
Obama betrayed some centrist positions of his own concerning deficit reduction. In 2008 Obama pledged to use a "scalpel" rather than "hatchet" to take on the burgeoning national debt. Once in power, however, Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt, the largest increase in history. And during the debt ceiling debate in the summer of 2011, Obama ignored his own deficit panel, proposed $3 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts, and counted the planned withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as $1.1 trillion in savings, a dubious budgeting gimmick.