Co-Opted in Record Time

I like Sen. Obama, and a couple positions he's boldly advocated - like an Office of Public Integrity to oversee Senate corruption, and his health care-for-alternative energy horse trade - showed a new way to boldly solve problems. But this article in The Nation by David Sirota shows a lot of same-old same-old in his approach. Obama doesn't want to upset the apple cart, but work within the system. And I've never seen a Senator downplay expectations more; every other word out of his mouth is "there's only so much I can do."

Joan Claybrook, president of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, tells the story of how, after Obama voted for the class-action bill, he attended a meeting of public-interest groups. "We were worried about what his vote indicated about him for the future," she said. "And he told us, 'Sometimes you have to trim your sails.' And I asked myself, Trim your sails for what? You just got elected by a wide margin--what are you trimming your sails for?"

In a Senate where even primary losers might get backing as long as they're in the incumbent club, Obama was supposed to be something different. But he put on that metaphorical gray hair and the paunch awful quick, didn't he?

Read the whole thing. One thing Sirota told me when I met him at YearlyKos, right after Jon Tester cruised to victory in the Democratic primary in Montana, was that "Two people are frightened by the Tester victory. Conrad Burns, and Max Baucus." Baucus is the centrist, DLC technocrat who sees his style of politics threatened by the hard-charging organic farmer and all-around regular person Jon Tester. I can assure you that Barack Obama isn't striking any similar fear in the hearts of anyone right now. He's as DC-ready as they come.

It doesn't mean he's not a good liberal, or even a good Presidential candidate. It's that he feels constrained by things that aren't actually constraints. He doesn't believe in the power of change. At least not right now.