| By now, you might have seen screenshots showing Obama advertisements on Drudge. I just received the following comment from the campaign:
Someone is circulating a screengrab of an Obama ad on drudge. Even
if it's true, it wasn't intentional, the site isn't on the approved
list of sites we advertise on.
This doesn't really surprise me. I've seen Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh ads show up on Open Left because we use Google Ads. That doesn't mean we approve of them, or they approve of us. It just means we use the same advertising vendors, and these things happen sometimes.
Still, while this specific event does not appear to be a problem, even as Obama appears to be inching toward victory in Iowa, I can't help but conclude that an Obama victory will be in spite of most of the progressive blogosphere, rather than because of it. The progressive blogosphere has long urged a confrontational approach to Republicans, something that just doesn't mesh with Obama's rhetoric. I think Atrios summed this situation up rather well yesterday:
In his own subtle way, running against the party - at least to the extent that it's part and parcel with the Village in general - has long been Obama's message. But he's also long been good at blurring just what that meant, wink wink nudge nudge suggesting he was running to its left even as he used rhetoric which suggested he was running as David Broder's love child.
Progressive bloggers complain about Democrats too, but not in the centrist way that Obama seems to be doing. Marc Ambinder writes:
Obama's closing argument is more audacious than it seems; it's an end-run around the established interests of the Democratic Party. He is angering -- often deliberately -- some of the party's core constituencies; Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas and my Atlantic colleague, Matt Yglesias, have both (sort of) withdrawn their endorsements of Obama because of his penchant for allegedly using right-wing talking points to smear his Democratic rivals.
Obama just isn't using the same arguments or rhetoric that the progressive blogosphere uses about Republicans and Democrats. He is also, as both Matt and Jerome have noted several times, building his own, in-house activist movement instead of working with the existing progressive movement. And so, even though he is clearly at least the second favorite in the progressive blogosphere, if he wins, it will be in spite of the progressive blogosphere, rather than because of it.
If Obama does win the nomination, I hope that his campaign will be more willing to work with the progressive blogosphere than it was in the primary. Also, an Obama victory will be at least partially for progressive reasons: huge grassroots support, opposition to the war from the start, and a generational shift in politics. I remain unsettled both by the role of progressive media during an Obama administration, by a what seems to be his willingness to compromise with Republicans who never compromise themselves, and by what seems be an almost complete unwillingness to promote progressivism itself. However, there are some good things about him too, and I am more than willing to both help him out, and to keep criticizing him, in the event that he wins the nomination. |
