[A warm welcome to the usual suspects. What took you so long? -- lambert]

Mr. Bowers loses his touch, and makes a clumsy attempt to conflate snark in a Quick Hit with commentary: "Progressive bloggers don’t write about single-payer because they are afraid of Rahm"*.

Fortunately, I assumed that "progressives" like Bowers would stoop to outright censorship at some point, so here is the post Bowers censored in order to replace with that link:

So, the question's still on the table: Why don't "progressive" bloggers cover single payer?

And now, the badge of honor!

Banned!

Finally, here's the post that Bowers is concerned to avoid answering (it was at the other end of the "can't understand" link (I think) in the screen dump above). Let me just post that screen dump for the record:

I'll admit: I'm a little bit jealous. Or at least, jealous for Lambert. He's a WASP, and therefore is "worthy" of making the NYT's political pages, right? Oh well. Bowers has become the new, eminently misquotable whipping boy for the "angry Left," and thus not to be contacted directly, lest some terrible germ infect the sacred flesh of reporters. He's calling from Inside the House!!!

I just noticed this article in the New York Times now. Emphasis mine:

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential Daily Kos site on the Internet, said it was way too early to begin judging Mr. Obama. "Some people may be nit-picky about his choices but at the end of the day, he's going to make better choices than John McCain would have made," Mr. Moulitsas said by telephone. "There will be a time to push him, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm going to wait to see what it means on a policy basis, not on personalities."

Some bloggers have been less patient. "Why isn't there a single member of Obama's cabinet who will be advising him from the left?" asked Chris Bowers on his site, OpenLeft.com.

The reason I emphasized those two lines is because I was never contacted by the author of the piece, Peter Baker, about an interview for the article. So, if you are a blogger perceived as supportive of Obama, you get a phone call. However, if you are perceived as critical of Obama, you are just selectively quoted in order to fit into the existing narrative.

Come to think of it, I wasn't I contacted by The Politco for their piece that quoted me. Nor was I contacted by the New York Times for the piece where they quoted me last month. Nor by USA Today last month. Nor by UPI. Nor by Salon. Nor by Time (even though Beinart actually works with someone who is dating one of my cousins, and it wouldn't have been hard to fine me). Nor by The Washington Post. I was actually contacted by Fox News, which has quoted me a few times recently, but I declined to appear on their network. MSNBC also contacted me, and I had a great time on Hardball.

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... Well, make up your own vivid simile. Check the commentary on this Netroots panel, whose ostensible subject matter was:

In this blogosphere-focused panel, moderator Chris Bowers will pose two questions—one about the Obama/Clinton conflict in the blogosphere community and the second looking at how blogs compare with other forms of social media.

He's regaining his sanity, get this man more Kool-aid, Stat!:

While the Daily Kos diary in question is specifically arguing that the Cooper plan was great (although that is implied), it does take as its main point that health care reform failed in 1993-1994 because Democrats, specifically Hillary Clinton, weren't nice enough to conservatives. If only Hillary Clinton had been nicer to conservatives, then we could have had great health care plans like Jim Cooper's. Hell, Jim Cooper himself says so. And look, David Brooks agrees, so it much be right.

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Frankly, I don't find all that much to get upset about in the Chris Bowers Open Left post to which Lambert refers here. Okay, the post has a slightly condescending tinge to its tone, but why shouldn't Democrats be proud that now more than ever the Democratic base looks like America? Bill Clinton himself once noted the same, and pledged that his administration would too, one pledge among many, many that Clinton kept.

While I'm on this subject, I want to remind everyone that neither any particular African-American nor the African-American community as a whole needs to apologize for voting for an African-American candidate for President, or any other office, for that matter. Black folks have been voting for white folks for decades now. And it isn't as if Obama got their support automatically. It was only when he convinced many of them that he was viable, and presented a vision they obviously found inspiring, as is true for a large swathe of the electorate, that they have flocked to him. So, we are not talking about identity politics here. Remember, it was Obama who has been running as a post-racial candidate, for which many of us here at Corrente criticized him, rightly so, in my opinion.

Back to Bowers. It's this stunning post that should be the focus of our incredulous ire, although I do realize that in Lambert's majestic takedown, of Matt Stoller's chilling foray into Obama triumphalism, this Bowers post is mentioned along with the fact that Bowers starts with an admiring nod to the Stoller post.

In his post, Bowers is imagining/predicting what kind of changes in Democratic governance we might be seeing from an Obama presidency. Fasten your seat belts.

Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.

I'm not even sure what that means. Who the hell are the creative class?