I've received a couple of emails suggesting my earlier post was an attack on Obama. Not so. I'm ambivalent about an Obama run. If anything I'm favor of him running because it'll be good for business. My intent was simply to point out 1) how uncritical the media has been of Obama and 2) that many people really don't have much of a clue about what the guy stands for.

Indeed, this last point is the reason what little criticism and scrutiny Obama has faced thus far has come from the progressive left. David Sirota illustrates the point again today at the Huffington Post with an entry titled, "The Ridiculousness & Danger That Is Obama '08." Sirota writes:

The national media is swooning over Obama, begging him to run for president. Yet, at the same time, they are implicitly acknowledging that he has actually not "developed significant legislative initiatives." In other words, we are to simply accept that the the Obama for President wave has absolutely nothing to do with anything that the man HAS DONE and further, that whenever he does decide to use his enormous political capital to do something, it is all in pursuit of the White House - not any actual sense of DOING SOMETHING for the people who elected him to the Senate.

I don't blame Obama for not having accomplished much - he's been in the Senate for two years. As I wrote in the Nation, the main concern about him is that he doesn't actually seem to ASPIRE to anything outside of the Washington power structure (other than maybe running for another higher office), and doesn't seem to be interested in challenging the status quo in any fundamental way. Using his senate career as a guide, it suggests that any presidential run by him is about him, his speaking ability and his fawned over talent for "connecting" (whatever the hell that means).

For progressives, this situation is perilous indeed. Obama is a candidate who has kept his record deliberately thin, who has risked almost nothing for the bigger movement, and in fact who has sometimes gone out of his way to reinforce dishonest stereotypes about the left.

Ezra Klein made a similar argument, calling Obama "a cipher" in a Los Angeles Times column back in early October. "Obama is that oddest of all creatures" Klein wrote, "a leader who's never led."

That might be overstating it a bit, but the core of the point stands: despite his popularity and current "rock star" aura, if Obama decides to run it's unlikely he'll just waltz to the nomination. Obama will be tested in a way he hasn't been yet in his career, and he still has a lot of questions to answer and a lot of convincing left to do.

One thing is for sure, thanks to the media hype surrounding his rise, expectations for Obama have been set incredibly (and probably unrealistically) high. Those expectations may turn out to be a very tough burden to bear.