Barak Obama: “One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me. And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect.”

This rejoinder (well, okay, it’s not a rejoinder) from Markos himself certainly surprised me: “Standard caveats aside (it’s early, we don’t have a set field, blah blah blah), it’s hard to see how Barack Obama loses the nomination barring scandal or the mother-of-all gaffes.”

Really? I dunno. I would have zero confidence in my prognostication abilities at this point. Meanwhile, this from Obama in the same article as the dKos-bashing seems sound: “I remember back in 2004, one of the candidates had made a proposal about universal health care, and some DLC-type commentator said, ‘We can’t propose this kind of big-government costly program, because it’ll send a signal we’re tax-and-spend liberals.’ But that’s not a good reason to not do something. You don’t give up on the goal of universal health care because you don’t want to be tagged as a liberal. People need universal health care.”

To a good first approximation, Obama seems to be the sort of nominee you’re looking for — someone who’s actually more liberal than his public image would suggest — rather than, say, an unnamed senator from New York who’s less liberal than her reputation (now that I think about it, this applies to both NY Senators, but whatever).

Eh? Color me somewhat unimpressed by this intellectual project, though see Julian Sanchez for a good rundown of ideas in the air and Will Wilkinson for some high theoretical backdrop. In large part, I just don’t think the idea of forging an “alliance” between “liberals” and “libertarians” makes a ton of conceptual sense — I’m not sure who’s supposed to be doing the allying or what, really, an alliance would mean in this context. There are sound libertarian or libertarianish policy ideas and lines of argument out there in the realm of economics and it’s always a good thing to try to keep these in mind and co-opt what it seems reasonable to co-opt. Certainly I would hope on the merits to see Democrats continue to evolve in a more libertarian direction on gun control and the efficacy of certain types of economic regulation, especially at the state and local level where I think a lot of zoning and licensing policies have gone badly awry.

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The Baker-Hamilton Commission’s come in for its share of criticism from the right, but in my latest column the left speaks up: “Bipartisan adoption of the ISG’s recommendations, in other words, may not solve America’s Iraq problem, but it just might solve the Iraq problem facing the bipartisan American national security elite that got the country into this mess.”

By my read of the working group’s personnel roster it is the case that the May-style neoconservative intellectuals who largely formulated the Bush Iraq policy and took the lead role in pushing for its implementation have been sidelined. Also scantily represented on the commission, however, is another important category of people — those who saw the direction things were heading and took a strong stand against the march to war. I don’t want to say that none of the experts here were against the war, which is almost certainly false. But while many of them wrote in support of invasion or worked for institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that backed it, virtually none of them — none at all that I recognize — engaged in public opposition to the war before it happened.

This, however, is just the very mix of silence, collaboration, and complicity on the part of “respectable,” “credible,” “mainstream” analysts that produced the war in the first place. The more courageous and farsighted voices who got things right were treated as marginal at the time and, shockingly, are still treated as marginal — excluded from all the coolest bipartisan commissions.

Read it all at The American Prospect Online.