Wherein I agree with Blanchard and Schaff???

Well, sort of.

I want to say first of all that I have debated posting this for the past day or so. I think some of the things I have to say about the Democratic primary are sort of upsetting to people whom I consider good friends, and I obviously don't enjoy making my friends angry. And though I'm with Hillary Clinton as a candidate until she decides to drop out (not only personally, but also through commitments I've made to the campaign and am unwilling to abandon), I'm also dealing with the notion of Barack Obama as the presumptive nominee, and someone I need to get behind in November, so I don't know if posting stuff like this is helpful in that process.

However, in one of the comment threads below, a couple of other Dakota Women posters and I went back and forth about an issue that seems to be addressed pretty clearly in a long New York Times article about Obama's history as a local-level politician in Chicago. It's also been a topic of discussion on South Dakota Politics, with Jon Schaff arguing that Obama is sort of a typical Chicago machine politician, and Ken Blanchard has addressed some of the same issues - asserting that Obama is an extremely liberal politician who comes out of an extremely liberal (probably radical, actually) environment in Chicago. He's also weighed in on some of the enthusiasm of the left blogosphere which I still believe needs to be dialed back to a great extent.

Anyway, with the Times article in mind, I would suggest that our South Dakota Politics friends are sort of right and sort of wrong about Obama. The article suggests something that I've long suspected about him - he's whatever he needs to be, depending upon the people to whom he is trying to appeal. When he's courting the liberal/radical Democratic activists in Hyde Park, he holds liberal views - he's pro-Palestinian, for example. When he starts running for statewide office, and needs to gain the political and financial support of the ardently pro-Israel Crown family, his opinions change, they change pretty significantly, and he leaves his old allies in the dust:

He moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of his Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.

To broaden his appeal to African-Americans, Mr. Obama had to assiduously court older black leaders entrenched in Chicago’s ward politics while selling himself as a young, multicultural bridge to the wider political world.

...

Others see his deft movements as a politician’s shifting of positions and alliances for strategic advantage, leaving some disappointed and baffled about where he really stands.

“He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge,” said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr. Obama in Chicago.

My reading of this article is undoubtedly colored by my bias in this race, but what I see here is a desire for power, entirely separated from any core set of personal beliefs, or any real sense of purpose beyond enjoying political power and wanting to move further up the ladder. If he needs to use the Chicago machine for a while to attain higher office, he'll do that, and then he'll abandon that and move on to something else once it stops working. That's why, I think, it's so hard to nail him down regarding his stands on a lot of issues. His positions change depending upon the group he's appealing to at the time. He's a liberal in Hyde Park, and a moderate in the Democratic presidential primary. He donates to the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families in 2006, then touts the support he receives from pro-life Democrats when he wants to gain the Catholic vote in Pennsylvania.

The thing is, of course, this makes him not much different than many politicians. However, many people in South Dakota's left-wing blogosphere have been representing him - and he's been representing himself - as something other than, or different from, politics as usual.

I'll direct you to page six of the article, where Rashid Khalidi, a longtime political ally of Obama's, says what so many people in the local and national left-wing blogosphere won't:

“People think he’s a saint. He’s not. He’s a politician.”