I believe Obama is inundated with requests from colleagues and some don't get the proper vetting because of the pressures of a highly charged campaign.

Not an excuse just a thought. How many endorsements do you think he has been ask to make on behave of colleagues or a favor for other Senators who have supported him?

Having said that I agree with Glen and we need ot keep the heat on and help "educate" our chosen politicians.

Obama could either let a true progressive run for the seat and risk the mobilization of knee-jerk conservatives or the defection of squeamish Blue Dogs on election day, or he could work to keep a "Centrist" Bush supporter on the ticket and bask in a little "post-partisan" glow in a right-leaning region.

A strategic move on his part. Considering his opponent, Obama has little to lose by tacking right here and there since there is nothing resembling a viable candidate to his left. Don't be surprised to see more tack nonsense like this from him in the future.

What are people going to do? Throw their votes down Nader vortex? I am disgusted by this move but see keeping McCain out as being more important. Is Obama's campaign going to hear from me about this move? Absolutely. Will is accomplish anything? Of course not. He is, after all, a POLITICIAN.

Opposing end runs around the Constitution doesn't make you a progressive. It makes you a conservative.

Getting Obama into office isn't the last step in a political process but rather the first.

A president Obama represents a vast improvement over the current WH resident, and over his current rival as well, but it is virtually certain that upon entering the oval office he will begin breaking his supporters' hearts almost immediately. One can already see it coming, and we're just barely into the general election.

For those who are emotionally invested in Obama--who view Obama as a knight on a shining horse, this may be a bitter pill, and in the long run could turn a huge portion of the democratic base quite cynical--doing a lot of damage in the process. Obama-mania could turn into Obama-despair and Obama-anger.

It's important to put Obama in perspective. Put bluntly, what we get with Obama is not a knight, a saint, or a savior. Obama is a chance--a chance--that the white house will respond positively to reason, if reason is applied with pressure. This is what we have not had in 8 years. We've had a WH that is literally proud of the fact that they don't listen to people, and instead force people to listen to them. Because Obama is more disposed to listen than Bush, is less ideologically bound, is politically sharper than Bush, and is personally at least twice as intelligent as Bush (imo), we really have a chance to "trade up". And, as he showed in his Great Speech on Race, he possesses more courage than Bush, or McCain. But none of this forecloses on the need to apply pressure on Obama and/or fight him whenever it becomes nessessary.

So:

Step 1. Place someone in the WH who has the ability to listen, reason, and respond, and is not by nature hostile to your interests.

Step 2. Make that person listen, reason, and respond.

I can certainly sympathize with your point, adnoto, and I think you stated it very well, as far as you went. But what really is your alternative? Do you really want a million man march? Maybe, but then what? As bamage asked too, it would be good of you to flesh out your thoughts even more. Your post was indeed interesting. But again, I must harp on the "ideality vs reality" of what you're speaking.

If it hasn't been clear that Obama is a clear calculating politician operating within the system he pretends to abhor, it should be now. I think Glenn's idea of bringing together many blogs and groups to bring the greater sum of their parts to this fight is the right move.....for now. If it doesn't bear fruit after a reasonable amount of time, I would think more drastic measures would be in order.

I wanted to wait until after he took office to start hating him

A

You can do so (as I did) at

http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/contact2

Thanks for this great (though depressing) article, Glenn.

I'm hearing a lot of "why do I even bother supporting the Democrats" comments on this board. Does that even need answering?

One danger of being a progressive working in some sort of professional field and living in a cosmopolitan urban area, as I assume many of the posters are, is that you can often forget that there's a whole other world of people out there who have no grasp of the ideals represented by our Constitution, and who care far more about voting based on their fear of foreign terrorists and hatred of 'liberal elitists' than getting outraged at the violation of these ideals. You can blame politics, blame the media, call me an elitist, but it won't change the truth of the fact that most of America still lives in a pre-Enlightenment era. And guess what? Their votes count the same as ours.

Now, of course, one will say that the problem is with the media coverage of political issues, that people are simply uninformed, that if these issues were presented to them in an objective and detailed fashion, they would make the 'right choice'. But stop and think about that for a second - if the people aren't even motivated enough to make themselves care and find the information that is already widely and easily available, if they are so passive and so malleable that their core beliefs can be molded by media coverage and political slogans, then what exactly is the point of democracy?

Let's do a thought experiment: If all of the academic intellectuals, all the Nader supporters, and hell, even the Ron Paul faction broke away and formed our own party, how many of us do you think there would be? Would we ever be able to match the people who fall in line precisely because they DON'T particularly care about any of these issues and simply take their political choices in a lump sum based on a general 'conservative' image? Not to mention that all of the issues that divide us are just as important, if not more so, than the civil liberties issue we are currently agreeing on. In fact, one could say that economics is the single most important issue, even more than foreign policy. It is precisely this issue that matters to the majority of Americans who are both too busy and too lazy to have the sort of abstract political/philosophical ideals that we base our votes on, and it is precisely this issue on which each party is more or less united. Everything else is just window dressing to most people. Of course, when their children get sent off to war, what was previously an abstract issue (peace, global security) becomes a real one, but this is temporary and circumstantial. If we ended the Iraq War today and brought all the troops back, it would only take a few years to talk most of the anti-war soccer moms into a war with Iran.

The point is that we progressives are in the minority, not due to historical circumstance or the current political climate, but due to the very structure of the economy that ensures the perpetual existence of an undereducated and apathetic working class. Once we accept this, we realize that there are two basic options: either a complete withdrawal from the system (which can take the form of either apathy or revolution), or continued participation and choosing the lesser of two evils in the hopes of affecting some gradual change. Personally, I think there is some hope in pursuing the second option and focusing strongly on education, since by increasing the amount of educated people we increase our own ranks. Either way, we need to accept that the abstract ideal of democracy is meaningless compared to existing economic structures.