Surprise!

Barak Obama: "One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me. And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect."

This rejoinder (well, okay, it's not a rejoinder) from Markos himself certainly surprised me: "Standard caveats aside (it's early, we don't have a set field, blah blah blah), it's hard to see how Barack Obama loses the nomination barring scandal or the mother-of-all gaffes."

Really? I dunno. I would have zero confidence in my prognostication abilities at this point. Meanwhile, this from Obama in the same article as the dKos-bashing seems sound: "I remember back in 2004, one of the candidates had made a proposal about universal health care, and some DLC-type commentator said, ‘We can’t propose this kind of big-government costly program, because it’ll send a signal we’re tax-and-spend liberals.’ But that’s not a good reason to not do something. You don’t give up on the goal of universal health care because you don’t want to be tagged as a liberal. People need universal health care."

To a good first approximation, Obama seems to be the sort of nominee you're looking for -- someone who's actually more liberal than his public image would suggest -- rather than, say, an unnamed senator from New York who's less liberal than her reputation (now that I think about it, this applies to both NY Senators, but whatever).