I'm not overfond of ideologues on the left or right who, it seems to me, spend too much time trying to fit reality to fit their preconceived ideas than adjusting their ideas to reality.

Obama seems to have no such problem, and to my thinking that's a very good thing.

The other point to remember is that he has a LOT more information than we do on the pragmatic benefits of the positions he's staking out and the path he visualizes to achieve his important goals. This does take trust, and that is the measure of the man that we all must make for ourselves.

We know that McCain has already supported public-unfriendly policies for political gain. Evidence of similar tendencies on Obama's part were in plain sight months ago, but it wasn't until after he clinched the nomination that we started seeing blatant evidence (FISA, NAFTA, campaign funding…).

That said, I understand why many bloggers (esp. those who aren't as seasoned as you) feel outraged and disillusioned.

Seven years under GWB made many bloggers ravenous for a president who would be vastly different from ordinary politicians.

Obama came along and repeatedly said that he is non-ordinary (and new and clean and not taking lobbyist dollars and…) .

He said those things effectively enough that many people were so thrilled with the claims that they didn't check them out before becoming emotionally invested.

But it wasn't just the bloggers' hopes and emotions that fueled their mis-assessments. Sen. Obama's campaign diligently worked to feed their hopes and emotions — and, perhaps more importantly, many media outlets didn't check the claims either.

Personally, I give those bloggers a pass for overlooking evidence that would have cast doubt on some of the ad slogans and sound bites.

I just hope that in future races, they'll do more research before emotionally investing in a candidate (and encouraging their readers to emotionally invest).

Lastly, I think the notion that Obama is merely running “to the center” is comfortingly euphemistic but inaccurate in this case.

The FISA bill is not a compromise and it is not a policy on which one should have even attempted to compromise. You know that: evident in your pointing out that FISA essentially legalizes illegal behavior.

In the Obama-McCain comparison FISA doesn't mean much, though, because McCain outright supports both parts of the new FISA bill and makes no bones about it.

There's a political reality about ethanol too. An enormous amount of political and financial power is concentrated in the hands of petroleum interests, and the Republican Party is the seat of that power, which to this day fights to equate patriotism with continued and increased pandering to big oil. Who can unseat this powerful and wealthy coalition? How about the corn lobby? Getting big oil out of the driver's seat is an important goal, and the coalition of agribusiness companies and farmers is an important Democratic constituency. It will be up to the new administration to move our production of alternative fuels in a more environmentally sound direction. The agribusiness companies and the farmers are capable of producing crops that take less petroleum input to grow, and it will be to their financial advantage to do so. The big shift right now is from drilling and mining for energy sources, to growing them. Decisions about what exactly we grow as feedstock for our alternative fuels will be made over the course of time, and I believe wise decisions can and will be made.

I agree with you about ethanol, (which,btw, is less complicated than FISA.
What I don't see is an easy way to tackle the problem.
Ethanol producers , and the local ecomy around them,are constituents, and as wrong headed as they and their Congresspeople may be, they can't be ignored, especially in this economic climate.

Like the poppy growers of Afghanistan, they need an alternate source of profits.if they are to stop growing corn to produce ethanol.
The ideas are coming so fast and furious, I don't know what Obama has in mind in this regard. I hope, though, that he is considering this aspect, or there will be chaos instead of improvement. Encourage use of switch grass instead?

Whatever the final decision, the local economy has to be sustained while new businesses or different business come up.
At least, that 's the way it looks to me.

In a country as divided as ours, pragmatism is the only possible way to work. Revolution would only be followed by counter revolution, and we'd be back to square one.

As to his working on the Beltway instead of depending on popular support, I'm glad he's not so naive as to depend on the undependable.. Popular support is a fleeting thing, while moving governance in the right direction is a long term, inch-by-inch undertaking. Juggling the centrist opinion on an issue while gauging the odds for getting it implemented demands prioritization. Prioritization and pragmatism are a good duo.
In fact, slow and steady has a better chance of survival than fast and rash.

I don't like all his decisions. I expect to dislike more of them.
As long as the direction is the right direction, Obama willl have my support.

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But that's the thing: FISA shouldn't be (and probably isn't) the center. Staunch conservatives should reject it because it is against their ideals as well.

Ethanol is not the center. Again, all reasonable people agree it makes no sense.

I'm not disappointed that Obama is primarily a centrist — I like that and always believed he was — I am disappointed that his “consensus” building on these issues is in the beltway power structures that have no real base of support in the general population…or at least shouldn't.

The only silver lining is that he doesn't seem to support it much himself and just saw that it was a losing cause to fight it. Still he should have spoken out.