This is my real Obama problem, as he continues to display no real leadership, as he continues to tack along the path of least resistance, and as he continues to do nothing representative of his professed values (FISA, anyone?), he show himself to be merely a politician...one who takes the easy road (gosh, running on a platform of vague "change" is not exactly challenging given the current circumstances, is it?).

So this is why we let Bill Clinton be destroyed?  This is why we let Hilary be smeared as a repug-lite racist c*nt who eats little African American children so that she could fill out her "pantsuit"?  So that we can patiently wait for real change because the Party leaders were both stupid and corrupt enough to drag an African American with no real experience (yeah, yeah, they call Ann Coulter a Constitutional Scholar too, those words haven't meant much to me in a while) across an artificial finish line for literally 30 pieces of silver (Obama will raise more funds, he must be a better candidate).  

We're trading the knocking down of one barrier (which I agree is important to knock down) for the continued sodimization of the Middle, Working and Poor Classes by the Corporatic machine because it will make us feel "just" as a Nation.  What will make us "just" as a nation is when we actually have a just System!  I'm not two, I realize that "Absolute Justice" is about as realistic as the "Perfect Market", but that doesn't mean we can't try to make things more just, and a cosmetic change at the top is meaningless.  Sure, it will be a nice irony if an African American can occupy the Capital built by slaves, but it won't really change anything, especially if we're not going to push for the necessary, I'd say vital, changes that must be made.

Jeebus effing Crisco.

So he feels our choice is either image or substance? Well I'll take substance any day.

As a Democrat whom they've already successfully, and erroneously, labeled as super liberal (and closet terrorist, which amounts to the same thing) Obama must work twice as hard as an older white male would have to do to prove to the gasbag elites that he can "connect" with Real Americans.

from Digby, because it doesn't really line up with what happened in the primaries.  He had basically nothing to prove to the gasbag elites, because they loved him so desperately.  Work twice as hard as John Edwards?  The media would've buried him as a candidate for that expensive haircut.  

He won a primary contest featuring unprecedented turnout while running with a completely unconventional foreign policy.  Just based on the size of the primary turnout, he has a mandate of sorts.

But instead of reassuring Hillary voters and going after them, to really wrap things up, he has been a bit dismissive, although I think the Unity NH appearance was good.  Reports from his meeting with the Black Caucus were less rosy.

Running to the center as he has the last week and a half seems designed for some invisible voting bloc that doesn't exist.  I don't think the Hillary voters need him to do that.  I don't think the libertarians Ben Masel thinks could swing to him want him to do that.  

And again, none of what he is doing innoculates him from future Republican attacks, except on gun control.  When they really go after him, it will be on foreign policy, talks without preconditions, etc.  Approving of domestic spying without warrants iwill be completely useless in deflecting those attacks.  

I sort of wonder if he didn't just forfeit his FISA stance because he wanted to sideline it.  His campaign is so tightly controlled that a battle in Congress may have been just a little too unpredictable for them.  

FOR THAT, we'd have to change the village that elected him??

While these voters may not agree with all changes Obama wishes to enact they will not be surprised that he does enact changes.  He's a new paradigm.  They expect something unexpected.

Then, of course, there are the many who are counting on Obama to do something new.  After all he did say he would.  These voters not only expect something new they are demanding it.

Shakespeare remarked on this everything new phenomenon centuries ago:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

It's infuriating and depressing to see Obama squandering his flood tide and turning into a run of the mill beltway pol.  These chances to break the mold and throw it completely away come along once in a lifetime.

Just since then, he has equivocated on or flatly abandoned his previous positions on 1) public financing of his campaign, 2) the DC handgun ban, 3) the issue of Jerusalem in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, 4) telecom immmunity and FISA, and 5) NAFTA and other trade deals.

Add that to his opaque position on universal health care and timidity on gay rights, and I'm not really sure what he really stands for, if anything. What will he fight for?

I don't expect him to work miracles. I do expect him to be more interesting than my morning slice of toast. His campaign and actions of the past week aren't instilling confidence in anybody, certainly not in those who jumped on the "Change" bandwagon looking for just that.

And for someone who's made such drastic change so quickly, he's still really boring.

There's nothing gripping at all about him now - well, except that he's making these horrifying flip-flops!

But he still isn't engaging - grabbing - the public, is he? Maybe I'm just watching the wrong news, but shouldn't the MSM be following him if he's doing anything?

McCain is running many multiples of the ads in Ohio that Obama is. Is this because we've been thrown under the bus?

I hear he's coming to Ohio again, but again to a very small group of people and totally closed-door. Just like the last time he was here.

CLINTON WOULD NOT BE DOING ANY CLOSED-DOOR MEETINGS.

Obama's electoral problem isn't the color of his skin. Demonstrably, it's his associations with radical left elements. He was going gangbusters in his quest for the nomination until his associations with Wright, and with what Wright was preaching from his pulpit, were uncovered. Other like issues came up.

None of those problems were inherent to Obama's race. Another AA political leader might well have avoided them -- indeed, whatever his other faults, Colin Powell has managed to do so.

Unto itself, the baggage Obama has developed over the primaries would simply have doomed him in virtually any other election cycle. He has a shot of winning in 2008 only because it favors Democrats so heavily.

But if Obama acts as though he will have very little political capital to work with should he win the Presidency, I don't see how this belief is wrong.

And the one thing that strikes me as unimaginable is that Obama will ever take one for the team, and fight for progressive policies if it puts at any risk his own political standing. And his is a precarious political standing to begin with.

i don't expect sen. obama, should he be the dem nominee, to rock any boats. not because i think it would imperil his candidacy, but because you must have substance, before you can rock anything.

But nothing comes free and having a politically moderate president at a time when a more explicit progressivism might have gotten a boost is the price we pay.

Obama's a democrat, the other choice is a republican -- and a conservative one at that -- there is one option here.

Some democrats will be 95% fine with his stance on issues, others 55%, but they will always be more inline than McCain.

Early June Obama +4.2%
Late June Obama + 6.3%

Obama has increased his lead through June. Rocking the boat during a campaign doesn't win you votes. It tends to lose you elections. Elections today are won on fluff. The nuts and bolts of progress can come once you are in office.

That's what explains how FDR changed the country. It explains how Reagan changed the country.

Of course, there was a time when Obama himself portrayed himself as someone who might accomplish something of the like. And, of course, at the time his acolytes praised him for this, asserting that it was his greatest virtue and promise.

And what's certainly true is that this moment too is one in which the people are yearning for fundamental change. Conservatism, as embodied with a perfection heretofore unknown in the person of George W Bush, has been fully discredited. His unpopularity derives most basically from the ideology he has implemented, and the vast majority of voters recognize this. The Conservative movement has been exposed as bankrupt; it has no answers; it has come up with not a single idea to move it past its current failures, and reconstitute itself.

This, therefore, would be the time like no other to push a strong alternative in policy and ideology.

And yet this splendid, and perhaps unrepeatable, opportunity will be squandered on a Democratic candidate who has no fundamental interest in advocating for such change, and, in any case, no apparent political ability to bring it about even if he were.

Bitter disappointment is, I think, a moderate response to this outcome.

Under the system as it exists today, you can hardly be surprised that the first black Democratic nominee would be reluctant to break much more new ground than he already has

If this is truly the case, if an AA would be "reluctant to break much more new ground" in one of the more challenging times our country has faced in a long time, then maybe we should do one of two things:

1.  Nominate the white woman who would be more likely to "break new ground".

2.  Leave the guy's blackness at the door.  The Democrats are the ones who seem to want to emphasize Mr. Obama's skin color.

The Village has rarely been hungrier for Big Change ... and instead we're about to hand the keys to a comfort-food accommodationist whose brakes naturally pull a little to the right.