An amusing post at TNR from the notorious Jamie Kirchick. I suppose this is your typical TNRism, but I was sort of shocked by the way he cites WSJ editorials and Eli Lake in making his argument, especially in view of the goofy arguments made by both.
Not to get much into the WSJ editorial, I'll just note that TNR is supposed to be a left leaning publication, yet Kirchick seems to think the editorial's assertions to the effect that Obama is running for a "third Bush term" vindicates his own political perspective. Perhaps it does. I don't usually read him.
But onto Eli Lake, as quoted by Kirchick. This is the part that made me "laugh out loud," as they say:
I bet at least half of the netleft are failed professors, over-educated literary theory PHDs, who make themselves appear more numerous than they are through their anonymity and deliberate manipulation of google. Their real audience are the technocrat staffers for Dems on the Hill, who agreed with them that their bosses were pushovers during the Bush presidency.
It seems to me that Lake hasn't even tried to figure out who's behind the netroots (or "netleft" as he has it). Certainly, the failed professor set is significant amongst big fish netroots bloggers, e.g. Chris Bowers, but I think it's really the out of work lawyer/congressional staffer set that makes up the largest segment of big fish in the netroots.
Lake then goes on to speculate via question mark, after the style of John Podhoretz, that maybe the netroots is just a few thousand committed Marxists, continuing in the vein of the "failed professor" thing. Again, there's probably an element of that, as can be seen from the 9/11 conspiracy and the more out-there I/P commentators of yesteryear, but it's fair to call that a small minority. If you want to talk about small fry commenting types, by far the most active are the unemployed and those drawing income in large part from disability and the like, college students, and then the usual tech support types who produce the majority of commentary across the internet wherever you go. There aren't a lot of Marxists and those there are tend to be goofy Junior Spartacist types, not your more serious academic type Marxists it seems Lake would be talking about.
Of course, this is an 80/20 kind of analysis. Certainly a majority of blog commenters are pretty much ordinary folk with jobs and lives, but it's the people posting 30-90 comments per day who dominate comment sections and set the tone.
Anyway, as for Kirchick's main argument about Obama moving to the center, speaking for myself, I never had any grand expectations about his general election campaign and I don't really care so much if he's a super-progressive president, as long as he's reasonable on foreign policy, which there's every indication he will be.