It’s rare that I find an article of analysis so insightful that it sobers me right up and impels me to devote some prose to heaping laurels on it, but that’s just what Tony Sachs’ piece on Obama and the liberal movement demands I do.

I highly recommend you read the whole piece. It’s a work of sagely genius, marked by a rare divorce of candor from sentimentalism - it covers our recent electoral history without the kind of quasi-nostalgic partisan distortion so common to pundits. And the thesis it shamlessly proposes is that as much as the libs may cross their fingers, a leftie revolution just ain’t in the cards.

George Bush and his administration have made a hash of conservative ideology just as LBJ set back liberal orthodoxy. However, this is still largely a country of gun-toting, abortion-hating, God-fearing haters of tax-and-spending, welfare-queen liberals. Barack Obama, being an intelligent politician, realizes this.

He’s dead right for saying so, and so falls into a slim minority amidst the swamp of the deliberately dumb. For as much as our fatuous mainstream media and the callous GOP mercenaries at the National Journal might misdiagnose Obama’s record as through-and-through liberal, they’re only doing so to pick a fight.

The truth is that the Democratic nominee is not toppling any temple walls of conservatism - he’s not our Reagan, policy-wise; he’s our Nixon. Nixon, the dead-on brilliant, centrist leader who bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia while promoting affirmative action because he knew it was what was rationally demanded.

As Sachs says, 2008 is for the left what 1968 was for the right: A chance to exploit the crash of the other side in order to put a braintrust, not a true believer ideologue, in office. You wouldn’t know this from the dozens of sobby screeds literally littering the punditry on TV and computer screens - the last week has seen a piece on “Obama’s shift to the center may alienate…” featured on Yahoo’s homepage daily - but it’s the truth.

I have long supported Obama because, unlike most analysts who either find no value in admitting it or are too thick to recognize it, the guy is more intelligent than he is ideological. But right now, the press is giving itself a hernia trying to push this “alienation” crap until everyone buys into it, laying into Obama’s hamstrings like a latter-day McGovern.

I, and Sachs, hope and trust that Obama’s canniness and charisma will carry the day despite it.

Some have said this approach caused Al Gore’s loss in 2000 and John Kerry’s loss in 2004. But they were lousy, uncharismatic campaigners. Obama is exciting even when he’s pissing off the progressive wing of his party.

That could be his saving grace: Even when you don’t bathe him in blood or scandal, the guy’s exciting. He’s got Nixon’s real politick with Reagan’s charm. Despite how the progressives may pule, Obama could just end up a voice for the Bush-era’s silent majority.

Provided he can shout down the talking heads, that is.