Posted by
Lisa on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 12:00:00 AM
Fear not, liberals progressives. Barack hasn't abandoned you.
He still believes in all those progressive ideas he started out
believing at the beginning of his primary campaign. Pay no attention
to the appearance of centrism you may think that you see. The
progressive Barack is the real Barack...and you can trust him on that.
For the record, I believe him. I think that all these attempts to paint
Obama as a flip-flopper on Iraq are misguided, because his position has
always been somewhat nuanced...except for the times he implied that he
supported immediate withdrawal from Iraq. This was the position
progressives liked very much and many of them supported him over
Hillary because they thought he was for immediate withdrawal. Joke's
on them I guess. It's an unusual talent some of these Democrat
politicians have -- to convince each person that the politician
actually shares their values. Barack is especially good at doing this,
and it shouldn't come as a shock that he hasn't been exactly what
progressives expected him to be.
Those who bought into Barack's promise of a new kind of politics
must not have been around the game long enough to be cynical about
promises like that. It's still hard to condemn the idealism that all
these young voters have brought to the process. We would all like to
believe a candidate that we work for has the ability to be
transformative and bring needed change to the Washington
establishment. When we find out that the guy or gal we campaign for
isn't everything we expected, it does cause some to be disallusioned
with the process. But in this case, did these progressives believe that
Barack was going to continue to speak their language going into the
general election against John McCain? Surely they know deep down
Barack is still one of them, no matter what he's saying right now. If
not, they should believe it. It's far more likely that Barack will
stay left once elected than it is that he will embrace some kind of new
centrism that is closer to George W. Bush than it is to Bill Clinton.