Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

If anyone in the Obama campaign is listening, tell your candidate to take his foot off the centrism accelerator. He's feeding the left more centrism than they can digest all at once. We all knew and expected that you would tack to the center once the nomination was secured. But you definitely should dole this stuff out in a more piecemeal fashion. You're actually starting to damage the unity, motivation, and credibility of your base. And that has its costs.

-- BOOMAN

If Obama truly wants to be seen as a figure of change, he needs to talk less about the past and more about the future: not the war that should never have been fought but the war that he, alone of the two candidates, can find an honorable way to end.

-- GEORGE PACKER

An old saw has it that to a carpenter, every problem is fixed with a hammer. Can our problems best be solved with bombs according to McCain's military training? Will our problems be solved by using powerful family connections, abandoning past commitments and getting into bed with someone wealthy the way John solved his? Perhaps so. George Bush also tried to solve our problems, and the problems he created, according to his military background: that is to say, with lies, cover-ups, shredded records, invented stories and massive secrecy using the aid of powerful and wealthy allies. That's pretty much what he did during his brief and disastrous business adventure as well. Let's not do it again.

-- CAPT. FOGG

Obama is John Kerry with a tan.

-- GROVER NORQUIST

Now the McCain campaign is accusing the Obama campaign of coordinating with Jim Webb to "attack" McCain's war service.

-- GREG SARGENT

[S]ince Obama dispatched Clinton, he has seemed rather more attuned to what the people want to hear or perhaps he has simply traded the wants of a liberal audience for those of a more moderate one. Either way, he is treading that reliably time-worn path every nominee follows to the political centre. And the question for Democrats is whether to applaud Obama as a cunning politician who knows how to win or fret that he's given undecided voters reason to think his 'politics of hope' are just politics as usual.

-- MICHAEL CROWLEY

John McCain is considering picking Mitt Romney as his VP because of Romney's ability to raise beaucoup bucks from the business and Mormon communities. But if Romney goes to major donors in the business community and picks up $2,300 checks by the bushel, he'll just bolster the image of Obama as the people-powered candidate in the race. The ads are easy: John McCain gets big checks from Mitt Romney's fat cat friends. Barack Obama is funded by people like you. Please give $20 today.

-- JONATHAN STEIN

I have no idea whether Bill Clinton really said that Obama will have to "kiss his ass" in order to get his support. But I am curious as to exactly where this dude thinks his leverage is coming from.

-- TA-NEHISI COATES

Already, Obama is changing his tune from his old, and irresponsibly heated, rhetoric about "immediate" withdrawal to talking about the need for policies that would adapt to the improving conditions in Iraq. Given Obama's ideological leanings and inexperience, there's clearly plenty of room for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he too would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush's memoir a success story.

-- JONAH GOLDBERG

Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News