Obama progressive? Moderate? Whatever.

Need I go on?

He did fly a false flag. I was pretty sure he was lying but heaven forbid if that was pointed out to anyone.

Now that he is living down to our worst expectations the same people are defending him saying he was always just another Rockefeller Republican.

However, I wasn't nearly cynical enough, as the 2007 post shows; I considered Obama's Wall Street connections just another lobbying group. It never occurred to me that finance was the central dynamic, and that Obama would turn the government over to Golden Sacks. I keed! But not very much.

I am surprised especially since he comes from Chicago that he doesn't understand that not handing out walking around money to voters when they are really hurting will greatly reduce your popularity and chances of keeping your job.

A real political pragmatist would have understood that ignoring voters' needs where it comes to the economy would become problematic.  A real political pragmatist would have set aside his or her own ideology in favor of political survival at the ground level and taken bold action to stabilze the lives of the majority of workers - not just the accounts of a few in the financial sector.

No, he is an opportunist. That's his ideology: whatever it takes to succeed, and deprive the opposition of wins. Greenwald accurately notes that the Obama Rosetta Stone is campaign cash - Obama is doing things to deprive the GOP of usual sources, and redirecting financial support to the OFA machine.

Look. He ran Harry and Louise against a Democrat more than once in the primary. In politics, you can't make a clearer statement that you are siding with the insurance corporations who are primarily responsible for the mess. Wall St. put early money on this guy when no one knew who he was over two hometown powerhouses - I'm thinking there were some conversations that lead up to that, and sure enough, Taibbi connects the dots. His Sec. of Ed. is pushing a policy using GOP framing which consists largely of lite privatization for k-12 and requiring community service of low income college kids on grants and loans. Viewed one way, these are Republican stands. Viewed another, these are the pragmatic actions of someone who will casually dismiss Democratic ideals and traditions if he can stock a 1 or 2 billion dollar 2012 war chest.

It's there for all to see who aren't projecting their own hopes, dreams, and sensibilities onto him.

My two issues, health care and education are looking worse than what we started with. If McCain had proposed the current iteration of Romneycare, he would have been rightly mocked and ridiculed into submission by a Democratic Congress. It's not likely we would let McCain cast the private insurance market in stone like we're letting Obama. Voters want access to public insurance, an end to insurance co. shell games, and everyone knows it. But we can't say that because the party is terrified that Obama can not recover from a loss on HCR. Education? This is creeping Nixon-goes-to-China privatization we would never let a Pres. McCain get away with. The unions would take the same criticisms they've leveled at Obama, turn them up to 11, and force Congress to do something less insane like kill NCLB.

Greenwald points out that with countless issues of civil liberties, this is the 3rd Bush administration.

The difference with Obama is that we feel we cannot fight his endless corporatism in the open, so we enable him with our silence. We would have rightly held Hillary accountable, with improved results. But a McCain, we would have fought on the issues, in public, in front of a country that is infinitely more liberal than the last time we had both houses of Congress.

But it's a compelling, well-written, journalistic polemic which will be read and re-read for years to come.

Strangely, almost every blog to comment on it makes some snide comment about it's length.  But it's a breezier, easier read than the majority of blog posts.  And, unlike most blog posts, it's a true (although polemical) piece of journalism.

The latest affront to my sensibilities came from Sarah Palin who, quite rightly, pointed to the similarity of substance between Obama's acceptance speech in Norway and what she wrote about war in her autobiography.

One pundit, I don't remember who, wrote that liberals like Obama's style, but not the substance. The conservatives like the substance, but not the style. I don't like the substance or the style.

Jeralyn once linked to this ad by the Nader organization. It presents, quite fairly imo, video clips by Obama and McCain agreeing on just about everything. At the very end of the clip, they both say with identical amounts of pride how they mostly voted in favor of bills supported by Bush.

Obama is the child of a white academic and the product of elite private schools. That he often hits the wrong note with the white working class has everything to do with class differences and nothing to do with race. He has no more natural familiarity with the black working and middle class -- and the important role unions, public investment and public sector and military affirmative action policies, etc. play in their survival and success -- than he does with white workers. His only connection to that community is academic or second hand, through Michelle.

Frankly, even in totalitarian nations you have choice and change.

Obama told us he did not see a red and blue America but a United States of America, he told us he was not anti-war but against dumb wars, he told us that he believed in a capitalist economy and free trade but only wanted to negotiate trade deals better so that American workers were not left out in the cold. Throughout the primaries he was attacked only for not having mandates in his health care plan, not for anything else. Now the people who attacked him for not having mandates in his health care do not seem to like the mandates.

Your analogy is wrong. Obama has not bitten anyone in the as*. Some people who thought that they could manipulate him are just somewhat disappointed that they have not been successful.

This is the only explanation I can muster for why many of my cynical, progressive friends believed things about Obama that they would never have believed about any other pol.  Even believing things that were contradicted by the evidence and direct statements by Obama himself.

But it's a mistake to overstate the direness of such a situation.  The conditions are still good for progressive causes.  The Republican Party is in a shambles, and they're further exacerbating it every day.  And progressive issues are getting a fairer hearing than they have in at least a decade.