I'm getting ever so tired of this bullshit.  You folks who keep saying things like this never understood what we were talking about in the first place.

Nice strawman.  Hope you don't tire yourself out too bad beating him up.

What's funny is that it will end up being a bunch of Hillary supporters as his strongest defenders, ie Carvile and Begala, as another diary so nicely portrayed.

old politician with experience. Hillary was a 60-year-old old politician with experience. Woohoo!

and I am happy he has pissed off the radicals on the Kos. The Chicago Crew really knows what to do! I thought this guy was gonna be another George McGovern or Dukakis, scared to piss off the kossack purists. When he wins, I wonder what the Kossacks are gonna say.

Riiight! all those guys(Gore, Kerry, Mondale, etc)   lost because they were such lefties and Obama will win because he is a centrist.

Bill Clinton won because he could win southern states because he was a southerner. I wouldn't hold my breath for the southern states Obama can win.

Out here in the grass there are a lot of democrats who ain't votin for Obama no matter what. You guys just don't hear it because you have your fingers in your ears and are yelling La,la,la,la.

Most retarded diary of the day. Congratulations!

Obama has to win and govern before one can draw any firm conclusions about whether he's a practitioner of "old" or "new" politics.  Campaigning is not governance.  For my money, the big test, I think, will be health care.  Let's assume Obama wins.  The Dems will probably have a majority in the House but be a few seats short in the Senate when it comes to defeating a filibuster.  

What will Obama do then?  Will he fight a purist's battle in Congress and fall short (as the Clintons did in '93-4).  Will he dilute his proposal and pick off a few Republican votes?  Or will he have the political means to go over the heads of leaders of Congress, make an appeal to the public, and prevail? (ie. what Reagan was able to do with many issues during the 1980s). Or will he drop the issue and move onto something else?

That's the real test.  My sense, btw, is that he's trying to position himself to do the third (and that's why he's putting a lot of care right now into trying to identify those segments of the electorate who are comprised of indies and even Republican-leaners whom the Dems might pick off).  If I'm right about this, he's not trying to forge some sort of bipartisan coalition in Congress, he's trying to create "Obama Republicans" (ie. the flip side of Reagan Democrats).

If he succeeds, of course, that's very new.  Clinton never had any ability to talk to Republican rank-and-file voters (not knocking him for this, just saying that was the lay of the land).  And when it comes to actually passing items on the Democratic wish list, a new Dem president probably needs this support.

So, to my mind, health care will be the test.  Federalization of health care is probably impossible under the "old politics".  Absent a Democratic president with a Reagan-like ability to go over the heads of Congress, all proposals end in a Republican filibuster.

Don't want to get bogged down in any soporific definitions of what "new politics" might mean, but I'll suggest where some Dems, I think, are having trouble: Obama is making a play for voters the Dems usually write off as being beyond reach, and that seems to be confusing some people (because that doesn't the standard narrative).

Again, I'm totally willing to let the results speak for themselves (if this leads to the Dems passing a package to federalize health care then it obviously worked, and is new, and doesn't represent some simple tack to the center, because there is nothing centerist about this sort of policy).