Obama is not progressive; vote for him anyway

Dale Carrico nails it, as usual:

The reason [Obama's centrism] should not be devastating to progressives is that I think we should expect truly progressive initiatives to issue not from the White House but from the House of Representatives. For example, I think it should matter far less to progressives that Obama has not offered up a universal single-payer health care plan than that we know he has said healthcare is a right, and so will almost certainly not veto such a plan when it finds its way through Congress to his desk.

Anyone who is expecting Obama to actually deliver on radical change is a deluded fool. The advantage of President Obama over President McCain is not that he is a socialist dream candidate (ironically of the sort McCain's campaign has made efforts to portray him as). Obama's positions are not substantially superior to McCain's, aside from a handful of hot-button issues. Obama needs to be elected for only two simple reasons: to avoid driving what is truly a remarkable movement demanding change into cynicism and apathy, and to rubber-stamp any actually progressive legislation that gets passed.