If the medium is the movement, Obama wins by a mile because....why?  Because it is without content?  Because it is the change we've been waiting for?

Obamarama: Is it a Movement? Or is it Marketing? And What Should We Be Doing?

The Obama campaign frankly claims to be the direct successor to and the current incarnation of the movement for justice and human rights which won Black voting rights and an end to Jim Crow. Unprecedented numbers of young people have been put in motion, the corporate media breathlessly tell us, by "the Obama movement" and Hillary Clinton's staffers have publicly wrung their hands in dismay at the futility of running against, not a rival campaign, but against a "movement."

While there many similarities between a well-executed twenty-first century US presidential campaign, and a successful multimedia and viral marketing campaign, there are many important differences between both of these and a transformative movement for social change.

All three, to be successful, must tap into widespread, deeply held beliefs in their target audiences, and take full advantage of horizontal, person to person communications inside those audiences to push their message, a process marketers call "viral marketing." But the content of marketing and political campaign messaging is dictated from the top. Though the masses are passive consumers and sometimes the transmitters of marketing and partisan political messaging, they are seldom or never its originators.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=546&Itemid=34

Freedom Rider: Progressives Cave to Obama

MoveOn is not alone. It is incomprehensible that The Nation magazine endorsed Obama after making the following statement. "This magazine has been critical of the senator from Illinois for his closeness to Wall Street; his unwillingness to lay out an ambitious progressive agenda on healthcare, housing and other domestic policy issues; and for post-partisan rhetoric that seems to ignore the manifest failure of conservatism over these past seven years."

If The Nation has so many qualms about Obama, why endorse him at all? The editors could have simply made a statement of non-support for Obama or Clinton. The sad plight of progressives is all too obvious. "While his rhetoric about `unity' can be troubling, it also embodies a savvy strategy to redefine the center of American politics and build a coalition by reaching out to independent and Republican voters disgruntled and disgusted with what the Bush era has wrought." The Nation should explain to readers why Democrats ought to "redefine the center" with independents and Republicans instead of having their own agenda and fighting to make it a reality.

If even The Nation bows down in thrall of the over hyped "center," then all hope for true change is gone. In other words, capitulation is the order of the day, and Obama makes it more palatable than Hillary Clinton does.

Which begs the question, what happens to these "movement progressive blogs" should Obama fall flat on his face?

Give me a break, pleeeease, and send help to all these posters who seem hell-bent to turn this into the net-rots.

Am I the only one who wonders how Chris and Josh Marshall and Markos and Jane Hamsher and Arianna and others expect me to ever want to be on whatever bandwagon they're driving through the toobz? - they are killing their credibility, and giving us all a much harder way to go to actually move things in a more progressive direction.

And I wonder if it ever occurs to these people that Obama may not actually be all that progressive - at least as I always understood the concept.  I have heard enough GOP/right-wing talking points from Obama than I ever wanted to hear from someone who has (D) after his name.

And Chris Bowers is going to be back home living off his parents within 2 years and mercifully his bloviations will probably cease... unless he doesn't actually become the brownshirt he's always dreamed of being (God save us).

As impossible as it may be for some Obama fanatics to grasp, the future does not belong to them.  The world isn't their oyster.  It's not "their turn."  Their turn will never come.  So many of his most enthusiastic demographics are in actuality rootless people wandering across America with no real home communities, no real connection to local politics, and when the economic hammer really falls, they're doomed to be herded like sheep.  Ironically it is the tough old birds back in the rust belt communities who are going to be holding a better hand.  At least they own their homes without mortgages... and their "knuckle-dragging" children are still in town to take care of them.

When the Obama bubble finally bursts - as it must - a lot of these netrooters will, sensibly, be migrating back to their places of family origin to take up real politics on real ground... others will form roof-gardening communes in the desert... and the really unlucky hindmost will be scooped up by demagogues and cultists.

It seems that we can now add "Creative Class" to that, which is a term that is even arrogant in itself.

1. They are not specifically computer literate.  They have a facile ability with games, IM, vanity websites, P2P, etc., but not much skill at digging into information, data mining & cross-referencing.  They seldom click a link & check a source & they don't know how to make a link.

2. I spoke to a dozen or so who don't see a connection between the massive resources of the internet & their use of usually only the communications aspects.

3. Twenty or so had no sense(s) of history, even about their communication devices, which took place entirely in their lifetimes.  Bandwidth is a mystery, processor speeds are in terms that they cannot explain in real meaning (bits, bytes, gigs); it's as if they flick a light switch & don't know that the electricity comes from a power generating facility.

4. About 50 of them, in caucus, lacked any awareness that their actions have consequences.  It's as if they literally don't realize that Mommy & Daddy's vote for "W" is why junior & missy can't find a job & there's a war in Iraq & a war in Afghanistan.  They do have enough sense to hate the war & "believe" that Sen. Obama will do something about it.

If the Obama campaign can change the principles of the movement so quickly, perhaps there isn't a movement at all.

Even though it's patently obvious, it's still always nice to see someone acknowledge that there's no good reason the progressive netroots should be 100% in the tank for Barack Obama.

I'm reminded of a diary I wrote in which I noted that the "progressive" arguments I hear for Obama on the blogs don't always resemble the progressive arguments I'm used to hearing:

I don't think these people are being dishonest at all when they seek to redefine "progressivism" from how I understand the term.  Rather, it increasingly seems to me that they simply understand "progressive" to mean whatever Barack Obama happens to be for.  If Obama makes a disdainful comment about unions, well then, unions are no longer an essential part of the progressive movement, they're just a special interest.  Ultimately you arrive in a place where progressivism is not about Paul Krugman's economic arguments, it's not about the netroots agenda, it's simply about "bringing people together" and restructuring "our participatory form of government," as the above comments suggest.  It's almost as if the rest of us had no idea what progressivism meant before Obama came along.

Adolph Reed, Jr. on Democracy Now!

What Obama has put together is not so much a coalition as a fan club... I mean, you don't build a movement around a political campaign. I know I've heard people say that, well--you know, Kool-Aid drinkers have said that, well, you know, this could be--he could set in motion forces like those that moved FDR in a progressive direction, those that moved JFK in a progressive direction. But as Will Jones, the historian at the University of Wisconsin, has pointed out, you know, that comparison fails, because in each of those cases there were dynamic, rooted social movements that had been pushing for progressive agendas with popular bases on the ground prior to the election of the president.

You know, you can't compare--frankly, I think the comparison of the Obama coalition to either, you know, the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the Greensboro sit-ins or the Gastonia textile strike, you know, just fall completely flat, because this is a candidate- centered politics.

I thought at first I had better say the conclusion is wrong about Obama being a better fit with the medium until I realized what a huge criticism of Obama that is given the definition of the medium so described.

Just a bunch of noise and people being mean to each other.  Rarely anything worthwhile.

. . . [F]rom a "medium is the movement" perspective, the choice between Clinton and Obama isn't really even a choice at all. It's Obama by a mile.

Why? Did Obama invent the internet?

Are we trying to alienate as many other voters as we can?

Perhaps the de-centralization of mass media consumption, the public sphere interaction, and cultural production brought on by the Internet is the progressive movement.

Who ARE these people on the Internets that are so rah-rah for Obama?

We should expect other changes in the future, including an inevitable rejection of Obama's ideas on partisanship and Fox News.

This statement isn't supported in the post.  Indeed, parts of it seem to contradict it.

The result of this conflagration of ego is a so-called movement with no principles whatsoever.