Progressive street cred

Among some on the left, Sen. Obama has been seen as a bit too centrist at times, best exemplified by his decision to vote for Pres. Bush's FISA bill after stating he was very against telecom immunity. Liberal voices are now about two months away from the election, so they have decided that now is not the time to turn wobbly. The more progressive voices are now starting to say, "He is one of us". Kos described it as "a full-throated defense of progressive principles". He went further to say

"To be honest, this is the speech -- aggressive and unabashedly populist --
I expected Biden to give. I couldn't be more pleased to have gotten it instead
from the standard bearer himself."

Biden the populist? The senator who the Netroots refer to as the Senator representing MBNA and championed the Patriot Act? So much for reality having a liberal bias. Another blogger, who is far more populist, David Sirota seems to be in general election mode as well, proclaiming that Obama is now following the Sirota script.

If his convention speech tonight is any indication, Barack Obama has (finally) signaled that progressive economic populism is going to be the central thrust of Democrats campaign in the stretch run of the 2008 election.

This is not the first incarnation of Obama as the populist though. He spent some time in the primaries bashing NAFTA, only to be undercut by an aide who told the Canadians that it was just talk. After the primaries, Obama even admitted the free trade rhetoric got overheated.

So now the Dem blogs are in full general election mode, this is summed up in an interview with Naomi Klein. She goes after liberal institutions

But a huge amount of the progressive infrastructure, in terms of policy institutes, think tanks, magazines, blogs, is pretty much part of the Obama machine and is sort of suspending a fair bit of their critical thinking. They're kind of in war mode, they're in crisis mode, and it's "We have to keep McCain out, and if we have to sacrifice some of our honesty and integrity to do that, then so be it. We'll deal with it after the vote."

She details that Obama is not anti-war and that Moveon.org is failing its members by not pointing this out to them, and are reduced to the role of "cheerleader". Klein points to democrats on Wall Street who want Obama to soften his tax plan and describes one Obama advisor as:

Jason Furman is a young economist. I think he's 37 years old. And he's actually best known for his defenses of Wal-Mart. He's written papers, taken on people like Barbara Ehrenreich, saying that Wal-Mart is actually a force of progressive good because of its low prices

Klein has had some problems in the past with the truth, she severely misrepresented Milton Friedman as a neo-con, but I think she has a better grasp of who is with her and who is against her on her own side of the political spectrum. Klein clearly points out how vastly different she is from Obama, yet many of the same websites that heap praise on Naomi Klein, do the same to Sen. Obama. A chart from Politcal Compass Test shows how relatively close Obama and McCain are to each other, when compared to many of the scores Daily Kos posters include in their signature lines. I have no great liking for Naomi Klein, but at least she will state what Obama is and isn't.