Barack Obama isn't even President yet, and he's already angering some of his most devoted followers on the party's left wing. This is the mark of what could be a very successful presidency.
"With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head," wrote David Sirota on the popular liberal blog OpenLeft, decrying the serial betrayals of Obama and the congressional Democratic majority..."We better understand why this happened," he fumed.
Allow me to provide an answer. You don't matter.
Ouch. But can Obama really dismiss the left-wing blogosphere so easily? More importantly, does he want to?It all hangs on what you think Obama's real ideology is. Is he actually a post-partisan centrist moderate middle-of-the-roader bridge-builder he claimed to be? If so, then Kirchik is absolutely right.
A moderate Obama would have almost nothing to lose by breaking with the blogging heads of his party. They're already on the furthest left fringes, so any defections to the GOP are supremely unlikely. And by playing the part of the moderate standing up to the bizarro-left, he can burnish his indie credentials.
But if you think Obama's a far-left quasi-socialist? He probably can't afford to brush off the bloggers so easily. They, after all, are the most dedicated members of the Democratic party. If Obama crosses them, they won't hesitate to bombard their congressmen with angry calls, letters, and e-mails.
Obama's interactions with the netroots will show us where his priorities lie. Will he reject them and really attempt to build a new, centrist coalition? Or, when he's in trouble, will he fall back on his old allies at Kos, Firedoglake, the Huffington Post, etc, etc?
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