Norman Soloman on the dark art of triangulation:

Now, looking at Obama's choices for key posts, many progressive activists who went all-out for months to get him elected are disappointed. The foreign-policy team, dominated by strong backers of the Iraq invasion, hardly seems oriented toward implementing Obama's 2008 campaign pledge to "end the mindset that got us into war." On the domestic side, big-business ties and Wall Street sensibilities are most of the baseline. Overall, it's hard to argue that the glass is half full when so much is missing.

The progressives who remain eager to project their worldviews onto Obama are at high risk for hazy credulity. Such projection is a chronic hazard of Obamania. Biographer David Mendell aptly describes Obama as "an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see."

But in the long run, an unduly lofty pedestal sets the stage for a fall from grace. Illusions make disillusionment possible.

There's little point in progressives faulting Obama because so much of their vital work remains undone at the grassroots. A longtime Chicago-based activist on the left, Carl Davidson, made the point well when he wrote after the November election that "one is not likely to win at the top what one has not consolidated and won at the base."

By the same token, we should recognize that Obama's campaign victories (beginning with the Iowa caucuses) were possible only because of the painstaking work by antiwar activists and other progressive advocates in prior years. To make further progress possible, in electoral arenas and in national policies, the country must be moved anew - from the bottom up.