Liberals wince at how Obama has "changed"

John Kass:

When Jesse Jackson's Castrato-gate or the Barack Obama Nuts Controversy or whatever you want to call it erupted last week—as captured by the hot microphones of Fox News—terrible cries of pain went unnoticed.

Not from Obama, who, as presidential historians will tell us after his inauguration in January, was the great beneficiary of the rhetorical (and never actually attempted) Jacksonian castration, and no cries from Jackson, either.

Jackson's too busy to shriek. He's suffering the ambition of African-American politicos eager to replace him as America's race broker. And he's been hooted down in the style of pre-Revolutionary France, by white liberals who once feared him, though they no longer feel compelled to feign interest in Jackson's ridiculous rhymes.

The cries of pain came not from Obama or Jackson but from the American political left, from scribes and liberal editorial writers and broadcast analysts and eager bloggers. The true believers who evangelized that Obama would transcend politics as we knew it are suffering a Barackian hangover.

Greedily, they drained the kegs once full of sweet Obama Kool-Aid, drained them to the dregs and mopped up the remains with stale crusts. The inevitable happened—the pain that comes as everything finally becomes clear, in the rosy-fingered light of a terrible dawn.

Obama used them to crush the Clintons, but now the left is finally realizing it's been betrayed, on issue after issue, with Obama changing his positions in order to defeat a tired and disillusioned Republican Party in November.

They're at the dance now and he's the one with the keys and he's the only ride they've got. And they don't like it.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he'll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn't say he'd listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

And his cheerleaders are beginning to realize that Obama may not be the Arthurian knight in shining armor, that he may not be Mr. Tumnus, the gentle forest faun of our presidential politics. Months after his inauguration, after he makes Billy Daley the secretary of the treasury and Michael Daley the secretary of zoning and promotes Patrick Fitzgerald to become the attorney general of Mars, the political left may figure out that Obama is a Chicago politician.

...

Yes. That is the scary part of Obama. But it usually is after the election that the disillusions set in. It may also explain why his polls have "changed." It should benoted that his have gone down and McCain's have stayed where they were.