Pragmatic PUMAs for Obama

From Vastleft Endores Barack Hussein Obama:

This November, I plan to vote for Barack Obama.

What do I plan to do between now and then?

Tell the truth, like I always have.

Some say that the opinions of us dead-ender Obama skeptics are a mere symptom of depression over losing. This is condescending and willfully ignorant.

Some say that to criticize Obama is to help McCain. That would rule out, for example, the idea that the Obama campaign might do well to understand why Hillary supporters are disaffected with his campaign and what he might need to do to bring about his vaunted “unity” (giving him the benefit of the doubt, despite the lack of supporting evidence, that lifetime Democrats are part of his unity agenda).

Some cling (but never bitterly, of course) to the idea that Obama is some kind of tonic for what ails America, an energizing agent of change.

I find that awfully hard to swallow in light of his pattern of unforced framing errors like his repeated praise for Reagan and propagation of the fake solution to the false problem of “excessive partisanship.”

This year, we had a once-in-several-decades chance to repudiate the Reagan Revolution, and Obama traded that in to become the cuddly Ponuppy, unharsher of mellows, because it may charm a few unquestioning boobs at the mere cost of selling truth, liberalism, and real change down the river. Given the tradition of running toward your base in the primary, and away from it in the election, would it not be healthy to have some skeptical, progressive voices keeping Obama honest?

Fundamentally, I believe that Obama’s approach is weak. Objectively, this has all the earmarks of a “change year,” and I expect Obama should win regardless of how pathetic his platform is. But running weak is worse than running strong, and running weak will surely beget governing weak. We can already see where Obama’s religious pandering has gotten him – a lifetime atheist ties himself to a church and it becomes an anchor to him. What will running against the traditions of FDR get him? What will it get us?

and

At the end of the day, the lesser of two evils is less evil than the alternative. Even a paranoid holdout can see that.

Despite all the race-baiting, misogyny, church-and-state merging, system-gaming, rightwing-slime leveraging, GOP accommodating, personality-cult feeding, and happytalk bullshitting, Obama is better than the Iraq War’s biggest cheerleader, John Sidney McCain III.

I expect that what’s left of the leftysphere will continue to do a proper job of reminding folks of what a shit-heel the mythical moderate maverick McCain is. Pardon me if I don’t make a full-time job of it myself. I’ve got my Klan meetings to attend to, and such.

But let us not forget how Progressive Blogosphere 1.0 all-but-completely debased itself by going in the tank for Obama (without regard to how many of us he and his supporters threw under the bus) and reveling in Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

I’m sure a few A-listers will get swanky jobs or at least some first-rate cocktail weenies.

I’m not so sure we’ll get honest citizen journalism and a media critique under President Obama, at least not from the usual suspects… until the Kool-Aid wears off, anyway.

What will be left of America by then, I don’t know. But it won’t smell too good, that’s for sure.

I'd also recommend Progressivism and the Party.