Once again, the New York Times, that ostensibly 'liberal' paper, seems bent on electing a Republican president. But with friends like Maureen Dowd, why would the Democrats need enemies? She has been a veritable fifth column in the last two presidential elections, and has shown the same pseudo-liberal cannibalistic tendencies in the run-up to the present conventions. But now we're getting it from the Times' idea of the middle, or perhaps the middle right. I don't read the cropped bio's, so I'm not cognizant of the self- or editorially-applied label for David Brooks. Perhaps he even sees himself as a centrist Democrat. But whoever sets the basic tone, Dowd is apparently the unrepressed expression of the actual editorial spin of the paper: look Democratic, but savage their candidates on the slightest excuse.
            The problem with Brooks is that he has finally hit on something that all of us have been gradually coming to understand about Obama, that is, all of us who have understood that politics is about power and not much else. When I endorsed Hillary earlier in this blog, I was still under the impression that Obama was a latter-day and slightly denatured Kennedy. And I went off on how Kennedy misunderstood power. He failed to realize, when his programs stalled in Congress, that he had one of the greatest legislative geniuses in American history in his vice president. My history may be spotty, but I know of no politician who was able to dominate both the House and the Senate the way Lyndon Johnson did. But the 'best and the brightest' knew that anyone who said 'nukular' instead of nuclear couldn't be a serious politician.
            In this respect, I was mistaken about Obama. But what I thought was a certain thinness in the man was actually a function of the presentation, of the persona, if you will. No one, of course, could be quite that goody two shoes. What becomes obvious, in retrospect, is that someone ran a stunningly brilliant campaign. And while we may find that there is some strategic genius at the center of the campaign who is not Obama, Obama is the candidate and the man at the center. And the very nature of the persona he has shown us, and the effectiveness of that persona not only 'on the inside', in terms of deflecting us from the effective brilliance of the campaign, particularly in its immediate creative grasp of new political techniques, as well as the internet, but also 'on the outside', in terms of disarming his opponents, whether candidates or talking heads, suggests that Obama is the living expression of the strategy - that the functional intelligence at the core of the campaign is not discontinuous with the man.
            What Obama is discarding with his rejection of public funding is precisely the veneer of political innocence, a veneer that has now obviously become a liability. As an act of changing his persona, it will only provoke these horizon-grabbing simplistic judgments with a single class, the self-appointed political junkies. I suspect that the typical voter may have a significantly different reaction. The billion dollar presidential race is a matter of record. Assuming that we have somehow controlled political funding has become a peculiar form of self-satire. But I expect that Obama's rejection of public funding reflects the same intelligence that defeated Clinton. As much as McCain tries to present himself in terms of sincerity, honesty and integrity, what he bought with his kowtow to Bush is the Republican election machine, perhaps the last operative unit created by the achtung political fundamentalism of the neo-con con, but still a viably vicious, uncaged monster. And given who Obama is, we can expect the worst. In retrospect, it would not surprise me if the present maneuver stands with the other creative moments of Obama's campaign.
            Obama obviously will do what he needs to win. In that respect, of course, winning is the only game in town. He is not breaking the rules by doing this. Just the reverse, this is how the rule is written - which says a great deal about the 'effectiveness' of the rule. And to say that he is breaking the 'system' that 'controls' campaign financing, is not necessarily something that I, for one, as this absurdly inconsequential talking head, would care to defend. Where, exactly, have we controlled campaign spending? If Obama wins, he can deal with the issue later. If he loses, the issue was already largely history before he ran.
            But I do not think there are two Obama's. The reason I supported Hillary was the same as the reason I supported the other Clinton, knowing full well who he was. I believed in their progressivism, as much as I accepted their pragmatism. McCain has thrown at least as many of his own personae 'under the truck', in Brooks phrase, as Obama has - more perhaps. And his 'pragmatism' is far more obvious, a pragmatism that allows him to 'reinvent himself' over and over again without necessarily being called on it by the press in particular or the media in general. But, of course, he's just a politician. Obama has set himself up as something - not of an a-political ideal - but of a political ideal. And it's nice to see an idealistic politician who doesn't see losing as a necessary certification of his idealism or progressivism. At the same time, I think the people who set Obama up as an artificial ideal should go back and look at his positions. I supported Hillary because she was a true idealist, a pragmatic idealist, but an idealist nonetheless. In the positions that are important to me, she was strongly in advance of Obama, while simultaneously speaking to the pragmatism necessary to get her ideals realized.
            Obama has committed himself to progressivism. McCain has not. We already have disembodied feminine voices suggesting that McCain is some kind of heroic independent, when, in fact, there is no progressive constituency that shares his values. And many of the core groups of the neo-con coalition are now rejecting the neo-con hypocrisy and embracing certain ranges of progressive issues. Whether Obama's brilliance as a campaigner can translate into executive power remains to be seen. But where he goes from here, in the campaign, is the real test. Simplistic judgments about his character are premature.

- Jeremy