It’s fascinating to me that during the primary campaign, Democrats lined up behind their respective candidates and did battle, pulling no punches. But now that we have a Democratic nominee and a highly vulnerable Republican opponent, we’re all focusing our ire on…the Democratic nominee. Not that we should should spare Obama criticism, of course. It just seems odd that having made our decision, we’ve suddenly lost our fighting spirit.

I have no patience with the unhappy progressive left who feels betrayed by Obama’s recent “centrist” moves. For one thing, a tilt to the center is inevitable in the general election. For another, many of these actions, like the appointment of Jason Furman, are not actually that centrist. Furman is an excellent economist who’s a solid supporter of defensible left-wing economic policies. And for still another, the most progressive thing Obama can do is run strong down the ticket. For many progressive priorities, Obama’s stated policy position isn’t nearly as important as the size of the congressional Democratic majority.

And also, as it should always be said, John McCain is worse than Obama (usually much, much worse) on almost every issue out there.

I personally wish that we’d all focus our criticism of Obama on situations where he’s wrong, rather than where he’s insufficiently ideologically pure. Unfortunately, he’s given us several examples of wrongness to work with of late.

One is the FISA compromise. The others, annoyingly, are on energy policy–a place where Obama carved out a role for himself as principled straight-talker on the gas tax holiday issue. He might have built on that success (and he still can) in crafting a bold, no-bullshit message that the time for taking the easy road on energy policy is over, and hard truths must now be spoken and good policies adopted. He might have, but so far he hasn’t.

He hasn’t on ethanol, as the Times describes today. This is an issue where McCain is right and Obama is wrong. No getting around that, I’m afraid. Ethanol subsidies are a horrible idea–they’re bad economics, bad for food prices, and bad for the environment. If we want to support ethanol as an alternative fuel, the absolute best thing we could do, as McCain says, is eliminate barriers faced by Brazilian sugar-based ethanol imports.

Disavowing corn ethanol would be an incredibly difficult thing for Obama to do given his Midwestern roots.
But Obama isn’t running for president of the Midwest.

His oil industry policies have also been very disappointing. Pushing a windfall profits tax and legislation to target speculation simply conveys the idea that the problem isn’t with us, the consumers, but with the greedy executives and traders. This is just bad policy. Hitting traders and oil firms won’t reduce oil prices, so it seems foolish to suggest that they might. If you then accidentally pass your policies, you have to explain why they didn’t accomplish what you said they would. This focus also distracts from the better message–that we’ve built ourselves into a serious oil addiction, and the only way to ease the pain is to start building ourselves out of it. There aren’t enough hybrids to go around, and there isn’t enough oil left in the ground. We need to change directions.

On this issue, McCain is clearly worse than Obama. The gas tax holiday is ridiculous, the all-drilling-all-the-time policy embarrassing. Still, Obama is missing an opportunity here. The attractiveness of his change message gives him some leeway to bring up subjects typically taboo in political discourse. A consistent message on energy policy–that what we’ve been doing isn’t going to work and that the free lunch panders need to stop–would make for sound policy and good politics. But an Obama pander on any one issue involves political costs that extent beyond that issue, because they erode his ability to credibly offer a total, good-policy package. If you’re good on everything, you’re a tough-minded, serious leader. If you’re good on most things, you’re just an opportunist.