And, jesus, I can't believe I'm actually going to sit here and dKos and try and sell someone on Obama...I swore I'd never do this. For fuck's sake.

But here I am.

I have spent years here at dKos passionately bashing the hell out of the Democratic Party. Last fall I wrote diary after diary on health care, for example, and have written hundreds of comments in recent days deeply critical of Hillary's and Obama's plans. Like you, I don't seem the pushing the kind of progressive policies I want to see, that I know we need.

But consider something else.

What we have lacked this decade is not just progressive ideas. The other thing we have lacked is a progressive movement. The most common lament here at dKos since I began reading here at the end of 2002 was "why won't people do something?" We've always had the outrage, many of us have also had some ideas. What we've never had is a groundswell of Americans getting active and coming together to engage in political work.

We have it now. I was as stunned as anyone to see it, but by god, it IS happening. Obama really is catalyzing a movement. He's getting people to take action, where the rest of us have failed for seven long years.

I didn't think Obama could do it, I was dismissive of his rhetoric and his approach. But I can't sit here and ignore what I am seeing happening around me here in California. There is a real and palpable electricity about Obama. Conversations in the cafe and in the hallways are about it. Someone at the gas station spies an Obama sticker on the car a the next pump and they start talking about their hopes.

It sounds cliche and maybe in a few weeks or months or years, when another bitter disappointment hits, we'll wonder why we felt this way.

But the movement is real. The mobilization is real. And that's what counts. I am still skeptical of Obama on any number of issues. I never trusted any of these candidates on the issues to begin with. But I don't care about that much any more. The movement is what matters. As wu ming explained last night, it's about the congregation, not the preacher.

That's how I reconciled myself to an Obama vote. Progressivism isn't just about ideas. It's about mobilization. Action. Organizing. Without that, our ideas go nowhere.

In the end, progressive ideas and change will come from us, from those movements. If Obama is generating the kind of activism we have yearned for, isn't it worth giving him a vote to see where this takes us?