Over on the main site we have Mark Schmitt's column from the last print issue about how Obama is as much a sign of a new party as he is a new leader:
Whether he becomes president this year, sometime in the future, or never, Barack Obama will surely stand as a distinctive and surprising figure in our political history. Yet as the lens pulls back, individuals who at first seem uniquely transformative almost always come to be seen, more modestly, as reflections of their times, as products of trends and choices not of their own making. When Ronald Reagan was turning American politics on its head in 1980 and 1981, we saw Reagan, the man; today it is hardly revisionism to see Reagan as part of a long process of conservative reinvention and renewal, dating at least to Barry Goldwater's 1964 defeat, which created a role Reagan could step into.
Tomorrow's revisionist historians may see Obama's role this year in a similar light, as the culmination of a series of evolving ideas and conflicts over the last decade or two of progressive thought and action. Many of the threads that have become visible this year in Obama's campaign did not seem to amount to much at the time.
Read the rest and comment here.
--Sam Boyd
