On the bright side, Obama's final stump speech is actually pretty good. "We don’t need more heat," he says. "We need more light. I’ve learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still reaching out to those who might not always agree with you. And although the Republican operatives in Washington might not be interested in hearing what we have to say, I think Republican and independent voters outside of Washington are." That, at the least, is a bit less of the wide-eyed unity-porn the campaign was originally trafficking in. On the down side, some of his closing-weeks attacks are a bit, err, worrisome. Going after trial lawyers, for instance? Flooding the radio with ads claiming "Clinton would force people to buy insurance even if they can't afford it" and "Barack Obama will cover everyone"? Suggesting that nominating Al Gore was a mistake and suggesting, wrongly, that Kerry was a divisive figure when he was nominated? Some of those statements are simply conservative arguments being uttered by a progressive. Some simple aren't true. On one level, this is politics, and all these folks are trying to win, and you're not going to find any candidates pure as the driven snow and innocent as the newly-born. But Obama's comfort attacking liberals from the right is unsettling, and if he does win Iowa, it will not be a victory that either supporters or the media ascribe to the more progressive elements of his candidacy. Instead, they will search for the distinctions he's drawn, and, sadly, a number of those distinctions point away from the heart-quickening progressivism of much of this race, and back towards the old politics of centrist caution and status quo bias.
