Reply #108: what he said for the last 18 months was a carefully crafted political message

[leftofthedial]

one ambiguous enough that right wingers like you could read what they want into it and that sensible folk on the left could interpret in their way. (That's a good-natured ribbing, not an attack. Winkie winkie, nudge nudge.)

Now, he's acting like the "free-market," pro-corporate republican lite that he always was. He's appointed the IMF, AIG, Bear Stearns garage sale boy as Treasury Sec'y nominee and other good corporatist supply-siders in the other key roles. This will be a *great* 4 years for corporations. After all, they will have *all* the money by the time the bushturd leaves office, and they'll have a champion in the White House. For the rest of us, it will be somewhat more hopeful and perhaps slightly better than it was during the bush regime.

But we disagree. In the area of his Iraq draw down, the rollback of bush's tax gifts to the wealthy and in the demand-side FDR-ish aspects of his economic proposals, he's already backed off campaign promises and moved to the right--and he's not even President yet! It will undoubtedly get worse once he's official. I never ascribed "liberal" to Obama. I did expect him to honor the contribution that liberal idealists made to his election, but I guess I'm not surprised that he has chosen to insult us with his picks so far.

I'm not surprised by his shift, but surprised or not, it doesn't change the fact that he moved. His picks so far are well to the right of his campaign rhetoric, which was itself mostly quite moderate.