Markos Moulitsas has issued an interesting proclamation regarding Barack Obama’s defeat in Nevada:
Take a second for the bolded line to sink in. Obama hasn’t run as a Democrat? How so? It’s not like he’s anything other than a doctrinaire liberal on any significant issue. Obama runs no risk of seizing John McCain’s “maverick” mantle. And yet Moulitsas expresses the progressive blogosphere’s prevailing sentiment. As far as being a real Democrat, Obama hasn’t passed the authenticity test. What has caused the Netroots to conclude that Obama hasn’t run as a “real Democrat?” The only thing apparently separating Obama from being a real Democrat is that he hasn’t displayed a sufficient amount of bile as concerns Republicans. In recent weeks, Obama has committed a pair of heresies. In the wake of his Iowa victory, he said he wanted to unite all Americans including the Republicans. As if that weren’t enough, this week he paid a modest compliment to Ronald Reagan. The former annoyed the youthful blog-reading types who refer to GOP members as “Rethuglicans.” The latter likely incensed wheezing baby-boomers who still harbor a grudge over the deployment of cruise missiles to Europe. The Netroots presumably fear that Obama won’t be a sufficiently divisive figure. Obviously, no such fears accompany either Hillary Clinton or the increasingly irrelevant John Edwards. A potential Clinton nomination always provided an existential threat to the Netroots’ claims of influence. Clinton has never been Ms. Popularity in the virtual community. But an Obama win might be even worse for the Netroots. If Obama becomes the standard-bearer, he would do something far more harmful than reveal the Netroots’ lack of influence. He would put both their spittle-spewing style of politics and their definition of what makes a “real Democrat” out to pasture.
