NP: MLS Cup 2008

I would have thought the New York Times was smarter than this:

President-elect Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate.

Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy F. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury — suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.

First off, despite their qualifying the "most liberal senator" meme by saying he had "one of the most liberal voting records." He's a Democrat. Of course he has a liberal voting record. And unless he has voted with Dick Durbin 100% of the time, he's not even the most liberal senator in Illinois.

Second, Barack Obama has always been a pragmatist. I'm not particularly astute or insightful when it comes to politics, relative to bloggers and journalists who have much more experience, but this fact has been abundantly obvious from the get-go. I know the far left, and particularly the blogosphere (and, apparently, The New York Times), have projected all of their values on Obama once they matched up on the war in Iraq, but they really are just projecting. This is then fueled by a sense that they are "owed" something for Obama's success -- as if they would have withheld their support and let McCain win out of spite -- and that any decision where they don't get their way is some sort of rebuke. The hissy fits strike me as both petulant and childish.

Very few seem to look back at all the second-guessing that was done to candidate Barack Obama throughout the campaign during the primary, and through the general election, and that nearly all of that second-guessing was wrong, and reflect that maybe, just maybe, President-Elect Obama also knows what he's doing.