Blog P.I.

Sen. Barack Obama is profiled in the latest New York [Update: See the next post]. Andrew Sullivan calls one passage a “nice little swipe” at a not-so-little political blog:

Obama’s first year in office, he voted for cloture on the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court (though not for the nomination itself), earning dozens of angry posts on Daily Kos, a hugely well-trafficked liberal blog. Obama responded with a polite but stern four-page note. “One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me?” he tells me. “And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect.”

That lengthy post was “Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party” and with not a few exceptions, the 843 comments were largely positive. He followed up a few days later with the much (much) shorter “Thanks for the feedback,” in which he promised readers that he had indeed written the first post — suggesting he might even read the comments, too. And in the comments there, star Kossack Maryscott O’Connor dreamt of a Gore-Obama ‘08 ticket.

Flash forward fourteen months, and Obama is as controversial at Daily Kos as ever, and in more or less the same ways. Here is a sampling of the wildly polarized headlines from the site’s user diaries over just the past weekend:

• “The Ridiculousness & Danger That Is Obama ‘08″
• “Why Obama and Webb scare them…”
• “Obama, the GOP’s choice for Dem’s Pres. Candidate”
• “Obama is the new RFK”
• “Book Review: Obama is the Opposite of Audacity”

And though the sentiments lean toward the negative, a vocal contingent still pines for that Gore/Obama ticket.