O-mentum

The debate last night represented the best hopes of all Democrats, a real comparing and contrasting of ideas, where progressive policy options were foregrounded and both candidates came off well. In the aftermath, however, there appears to be a lot of movement toward Barack Obama. It may not be enough to overcome Hillary's built-in advantage on Super Tuesday. But there's definitely movement.

The SEIU state council in California, which had endorsed John Edwards, switched to Obama today. That will add a lot of organizational and GOTV muscle in the largest state. And so will the very big endorsement from Moveon.org, whose members chose Obama by a 70%-30% margin. There are a half-million MoveOn members just in California.

"We've learned that the key to achieving change in Washington without compromising core values is having a galvanized electorate to back you up," said Executive Director Eli Pariser, "And Barack Obama has our members 'fired up and ready to go' on that front."

Organizers said they would "immediately" begin mobilizing on behalf of Obama, leading turnout programs and phone-banking members of MoveOn in targeted states. The group made seven million "GOTV" calls for Democrats in the mid-term elections, and it has an extensive voter file database.

The decisive victory shows that Obama is consolidating support from the netroots in the wake of John Edwards' withdrawal. Obama also won the Edwards vote in Thursday's Daily Kos reader poll. He bounced 35 points to reach an all-time high of 71 percent, while Clinton held steady at 11 percent. If Super Tuesday is a tie and both campaigns brace for a protracted delegate hunt, Obama could draw fundraising, volunteers and advocacy from a united front of MoveOn, netroots activists and bloggers.

The tools that MoveOn members will be using to get out the vote for Obama are part of the new tools Democrats have in their arsenal that have been helping to drive this record turnout in the early primary states. The voter file is much improved over 2004, Internet and social networking technology has been a mobilizing force, and all of this is being used to contact more potential voters than ever before. That Obama is getting the brunt of this help augurs well for him.

In addition to "creative class" liberals, we're seeing some old liberals come around to Obama as well. Harold Meyerson believes Obama is the best hope to build a working progressive majority coalition and break out of the "politics of entrenchment," and The Nation comes out for Obama with a very interesting endorsement.

But while domestic policy will ultimately be determined through a complicated and fraught interplay with legislators, foreign policy is where the President's agenda is implemented more or less unfettered. It's here where distinctions in worldview matter most--and where Obama compares most favorably to Clinton. The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama's dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran's president. Her hawkishness relative to Obama's is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it's a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama's circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake [...]

Which brings us to the one we don't. A President cannot build a movement, but he can be its messenger, as was Reagan. Part of what tantalizes and frustrates about Obama is that he seems to have the potential to be such a messenger and yet shies away from speaking in ideological terms. When he invokes union organizers facing Pinkerton thugs to give us our forty-hour week, or says we are bound to one another as "our brother's keeper...our sister's keeper," he is articulating the deepest progressive values: solidarity and community and collective action. But he places more rhetorical emphasis on a politics of "unity" that, read uncharitably, seems to fetishize bipartisanship as an end in itself and reinforce lame and deceptive myths that the parties are equally responsible for the "bickering" and "divisiveness" in Washington. It appears sometimes that his diagnosis of what's wrong with politics is the way it is conducted rather than for whom.

This is why I'll be casting my ballot for Obama on February 5 as well; his opportunity to be a messenger for the progressive movement, and his distinction on foreign policy to not just end the war, but end the mindset that got us there in the first place.

That the race is tightening certainly doesn't mean that Obama is in the most advantageous position. This great rundown of the Super Tuesday states from Poblano shows that the best possible scenario for Obama is to fight to a draw. If so, he's well-positioned to move on throughout February (He's already running ads in post-Super Tuesday states), where the schedule moves a bit in his favor. But there did seem to be a feeling in the air yesterday as I walked around Hollywood. We'll see if that translates into votes.