center-right-left-center-middle-up-down-wtf... ?

Word is Rahm Emanuel has taken the gig at the White House, Chief of Staff for President-elect Obama. Meanwhile, the lefties are in freak-mode at Nancy Pelosi's stated intent to govern "from the center." I too would like the hard lurch to the left, and, indeed, feel governing from the center would properly require a hard lurch to the left, but understand what needs be done to maintain success, more important than merely attaining such.

Clearly, the corporate media and the Oligarchy are highly resistant to "real change" -- say, from crony capitalism to market capitalism, which the cronyists like to call "socialism." And scaring the bejeebus out of those entities, while viscerally satisfying, is certainly a guarantee that any victories would be pyrrhic as they would likely be short-lived.

So the talk that is talked will continue to be corporate-speak. The marriage of gays, for example, will be put off, as the gays in the military were not in the first 100 days of Bill Clinton's presidency. The assumption here is Obama is at least the intellectual equal of Bill Clinton but is clearly 20 times smarter, and should learn from Clinton's mistake of lurching too far too soon in '92, consequently losing his Democratic majority in Congress in '94.

Any transition promises to take considerable time to smooth frictions with a hard-right minority -- a hardened-right at that, what with the decimation of Republican moderates -- one still with the capacity to filibuster anything and everything under the sun. "Hope" in this context, then, means a belief that more long-term liberal policies will be effected, and the push to the left will not be as obvious but will nonetheless be palpable.

So I'm a practical progressive (possibly naive), not to be confused with a compassionate conservative, whom I'd consider a fraud at his face. I'm perfectly willing to let Barack Obama play his hand and see where this all goes. I'm encouraged, meanwhile, to hear Robert Kennedy, Jr., is on the short list for EPA while Caroline Kennedy is being seen as the U.N. Ambassador. These are good things.