By now, across the progressive spectrum, some familiar storylines tell us the meaning of the Obama campaign. In a groove, each narrative digs its truths. But whether those particular truths are the most important at this historical moment is another story.

We can set aside the plotline that touts Obama as a visionary pragmatist who has earned the complete trust of progressives. The belief has diminished in recent months -- in the wake of numerous Obama pronouncements on foreign policy, his FISA vote to damage the Fourth Amendment and the like -- but such belief was never really grounded in his record as a politician or his policy positions.

A more substantial narrative concedes that Obama has "compromised" on numerous fronts but assumes he has done so in order to get elected president, after which time his real self will emerge. This kind of dubious projection is as old as the political hills, and inevitably becomes a kind of murky exercise in armchair psychology. All in all, projection is not useful for assessing where political leaders are and where they’re headed.

In contrast, quite a few on the left -- some from the outset of his

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The world's newest international fugitive from arrest is a wealthy, square-faced man with a PhD. in criminal justice from a university in Texas, and a former hand-holding ally of U.S. President George W. Bush.

But Thailand's ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled in a bloodless September 2006 coup, blithely strolled the streets of Surrey, England, shopping with his family this week after dodging Bangkok's supreme court.

Seeing Thaksin and his family in Surrey, prompted a local Web site, getsurrey.co.uk, to stress he "is not the first wanted international leader" to appear in their neighborhood.

"Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet holed-up in a mansion near Egham as he awaited extradition to his home country, to answer human rights abuse charges," it said.

Bangkok's attorney general, meanwhile, was considering a seizure of Thaksin's frozen assets -- worth an estimated two billion U.S. dollars.

Thaksin's enemies suspect he and his wife will apply for asylum in England where he owns Manchester City Football Club.

Columbus Dispatch articles explaining the 2004 election irregularities all embrace the same formula: ignore the more than 1000 signed affidavits and sworn testimonies of disenfranchised voters; rely only on the word of OSU Law Professor Dan Tokaji who has no background in statistical analysis and who always tells the Dispatch whatever they want to hear; and then apologize for former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and fail to mention what is routinely reported in every other major newspaper in the state of Ohio.