Obama seems to have forgotten the primary source of MONEY for his campaign: SMALL DONORS.

If he thinks all of the "little people" who have so famously been sending him their nickels and dimes and have gotten him to where he is are going to keep doing that when he has turned around and said "Screw you", he has another think coming. Perhaps he should have taken public financing after all.

Use YOUR LEVERAGE: NO MORE $$$$$$ until he returns to being the Obama you sent money to.

Obama has also adopted the Republican framing of taxes and has offered a tax program that will continue to lose revenue for the federal government. Yes, it is more progressive and less bad than either Bush or McCain. But the reduction in funding will still hurt the non-rich more than the rich and if federal debt is not paid off the interest on that is going to burden the non-rich in the future. A tax on posterity.

Obama and Democrats are said to be helpless, but this state of events didn't appear out of nowhere as some sort of divine and irrevocable action. It came from conservative political activists.

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2008/06/invasion-of-economic-underpants-gnomes.html

And the fact that their views were fringe and ludicrous didn't stop them from making them mainstream.

If not now, when is their going to be a push back for reality?

He doesn't intend to win in November.

He's given up -- even before he receives the nomination. I've never seen anything quite like it in electoral politics. The closest analogs are Lamont's pathetic efforts against Lieberman after winning the primary (and going on vacation), and Kerry's equally non-combatative efforts (after going on vacation) against his oppostion and his abandonment of his pledge to fight the Bushevik electoral shenannigans.

But what Obama is doing -- as listed by Glenn -- is in a league of its own. He seems to be cutting off every constituency, one by one and in batches, and relying entirely on discredited neo-con and Bushevik dead-enders. That isn't even a craven political calculation, it's a political concession.

I'm not even sure he's going to bother getting the nomination.

Good god. What have they done to him? (Side note: there is a truly grotesque and vicious campaign of personal attacks against Michelle Obama going on in the right wing media, largely under the radar. This may or may not have to do with Obama's recent behavior. But it wouldn't surprise me if he decided, quite rationally, that his family was more important to him than the presidency.)

Please read this Salon piece by Steve Benen:

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2008/07/01/faith/index.html

The short version:

1) Religious charities have FOR DECADES worked with state, local and Federal governments, under heavy, HEAVY safeguards.

2) Bush ripped out those safeguards.

3) Obama is putting back those safeguards.

But of course things like facts in context won't stop the ritual evisceration of Obama.

I have no problem with Obama being a moderate pragmatist with cultural views to the right of my own, as long as he's stalwart on key issues like health care, Iraq, energy, and taxes.

I'm more concerned with signs these last two weeks that he's not as creative, forward-thinking and smart as I thought.

Every candidate for President has to put together some version of a "strange bedfellows" coalition or risk marginal status. But that doesn't mean he has to pander or act dumb or throw supporters overboard.

I wonder if the heat Obama has taken from the media for alleged personal aloofness is leading him to make concessions to the narrative of traditional media outlets instead of challenging them.

I do think blogs in Glenn's sense have changed the nature of the game by serving as People's Lobbyists and Progressive Interest Groups that Will Be Heard. It will be interesting to see how big a difference they'll make this year in keeping Obama honest and "the best he can be".

This was an efficient list of some of the most recent positions taken by Obama. This can hardly be surprise to voters who have been interested in the policy details of the candidates. If you think back a few months you'll remember that there was a large surge of independant and republican voters who were pro-Obama. They had good reasons for it. I think that a lot of his supporters, however, assumed that because he was not a DNC democrat, that this meant he was a progressive. In fact, I think a lot of people on the left, for a number of reasons, have pre-judged him, and have some surprises coming up.

I'm always interested in the lenses in which people see Obama. Everyone has a different take on him, depending on what they know and who they are. Personally, when I found out he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review I knew he was 1) a good leader 2) extremely smart, hard working, and ambitious 3) likely a born politician and 4) not in any way a progressive.

I'm from Massachusetts, where Gov. Deval Patrick, who wrote a lot of the material from Obama's speeches was elected in a landslide. He was a similar kind of inspiring figure and has been rather a disappointment as a governor. I think a large part of the reason that Massachusetts went for Hillary was because of buyer's remorse as "new, improved" politician proved to be "just another" politician.

But Obama isn't Deval. He is tremendously smart, practical, and hardworking. I just hope that progressives find ways to influence him, so that he remains their dream candidate.

But the anti-Obama feeding frenzy here at Salon long ago hit self-reinforcing Lord of the Flies territory (see Joan Walsh's tarring Obama with some supporters she cherry-picked for their allegedly intemperate comments in support of Wesley Clark), so of course this won't matter.

For months I've been accused of "being in the tank for Obama." On pro-Clinton sites, I still am accused of that.

Now I write a couple of criticisms of Obama -- even as I say that it's vital that he win -- and along come Obama fanatics to claim that I'm part of an "anti-Obama feeding frenzy here at Salon."

What has George Bush's "with-us-or-against-us" mentality done to people?