Fear not, liberals progressives. Barack hasn’t abandoned you. He still believes in all those progressive ideas he started out believing at the beginning of his primary campaign. Pay no attention to the appearance of centrism you may think that you see. The progressive Barack is the real Barack…and you can trust him on that. For the record, I believe him. I think that all these attempts to paint Obama as a flip-flopper on Iraq are misguided, because his position has always been somewhat nuanced…except for the times he implied that he supported immediate withdrawal from Iraq. This was the position progressives liked very much and many of them supported him over Hillary because they thought he was for immediate withdrawal. Joke’s on them I guess. It’s an unusual talent some of these Democrat politicians have — to convince each person that the politician actually shares their values. Barack is especially good at doing this, and it shouldn’t come as a shock that he hasn’t been exactly what progressives expected him to be.
Those who bought into Barack’s promise of a new kind of politics must not have been around the game long enough to be cynical about promises like that. It’s still hard to condemn the idealism that all these young voters have brought to the process. We would all like to believe a candidate that we work for has the ability to be transformative and bring needed change to the Washington establishment. When we find out that the guy or gal we campaign for isn’t everything we expected, it does cause some to be disallusioned with the process. But in this case, did these progressives believe that Barack was going to continue to speak their language going into the general election against John McCain? Surely they know deep down Barack is still one of them, no matter what he’s saying right now. If not, they should believe it. It’s far more likely that Barack will stay left once elected than it is that he will embrace some kind of new centrism that is closer to George W. Bush than it is to Bill Clinton.