Obama Unleashed

All the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the progressive blogosphere over Barack Obama’s FISA flip-flop and sundry other sellouts is amusing, but it also serves to highlight how extremely lucky the man is as a politician. (Let’s hope some of that luck rubs off on the country if he's elected.)

For liberals, the question "What does Obama really believe?" is immaterial, because he never intended to govern as a progressive. The internal dynamic of his unity coalition won’t allow it, and he was always going to move to the right. (See here.) Kossacks, TPM’ers and other fantasists, ignoring the implications of Obama's own rhetoric, convinced themselves that we needed him to save us from the fiendish and ever-triangulating Bride of Clinton. Since Barack wasn’t Hillary, and since he listened to Jay-Z, and since he said he was "transformational", he must be a liberal. Or something like that.

It’s lucky for Obama that events have helped him disillusion these true believers with early shock treatment rather than with a drawn-out string of disappointments. There’s a long way to go in this campaign, and his progressive followers now have plenty of time to get used to the New Obama and to think up reasons to vote for him. (Meanwhile, Barack himself can begin working on David Broder and his brethren.)

And now that it no longer has to coddle the lefties, the Obama campaign can concentrate on what’s really important: money. They’re going to use their vast and growing pile of cash to create the New Obama (perhaps by fashioning a grown-up, multicultural Richie Cunningham who isn't afraid to go to church before kicking some terrorist ass) and sell him like Nixon in 1972. They know McCain can’t match their expenditures, so they’ll always be playing it safe.

Liberals will just have to suck it up. They have nowhere else to go, as the Obama bloggers never tire of reminding us.