> He made major concessions to liberal ways of thinking, some good and some not so good. A major good one was fighting AIDS in Africa.

This is not making concessions to "liberal ways of thinking".

I think it is. Part of liberalism is seeing all people as worthy of compassion and help, even if they're not closely related to you. While the contrasting tendency in conservatism is to help people closer to / more similar to us and protect ourselves from outsiders who we do not understand, may not benefit from our help, or may even exploit us. Both of these tendencies are valid and adaptive in different situations, they're just different and at least somewhat in opposition. Do you disagree?

I would think a truly liberal policy would be to provide funding for the “compassionate” policies.

On the other hand, federally legislating that local school taxing districts provide services costing $x and if they do not, open up local taxpayers to litigation of $y where x and y are quite large is…something else.

How is a poor school district serving poorer taxpayers supposed to provide expensive IEP for every problem child and/or collect all the evidence to expel them, and at the same time provide quality education to well behaved kids?

Well, I'd be the last person to expect that any particular policy enacted by the US Congress does either liberalism or conservatism effectively.