The Sunday talk shows maintained the drumbeats of outrage over Barack Obama's decision to decline public financing of his presidential campaign, long after anyone cared among the few who noticed.

My favorite decrier was McCain-booster Lindsey Graham, appearing on 'Meet the Press' with temporary host Brian Williams and squaring off against the redoubtable Joe Biden. Graham's attacks were almost as comical as they were pathetic.

He kept trying to stoke some genuine heat over the financing issue -- one would have thought Obama had just gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia after agreeing in Munich to only a slice -- but Graham's downhome acting skills failed him, for once.

The poor man just didn't seem to have his heart in it, really, and probably because he knew he'd soon be required to defend John McCain's five instances of flip-flopping for every one of Obama's.

And quite unhelpful to Graham was Sen. Biden, who simply sat there in response to every charge of Democratic hypocrisy saying, "Yep, yep, it sure was, no doubt about that." Biden's casualness, bordering on indifference, zapped all of Graham's thunder.

But I thought the best denouement yesterday to this farce of a controversy came in print -- in particular from the pen of the Philadelphia Inquirer's national political columnist, Dick Polman. His piece [1] was titled "The American Debate: Broken Promise Will Probably Benefit Obama," even though it wasn't much of a debate and Obama's broken promise will most definitely benefit him.

His column, however, was more sensible than the headline writer. Said Polman:

Barack Obama wants to campaign on his ideals, but he also wants to win....

Perhaps Obama is simply doing what it takes.... He figures that if he gets some grief for his decision, so be it, because the nuts-and-bolts benefits of outspending McCain by as much as 5-1 are so obvious. For instance, he'll have the money to expand the electoral map. He can invest heavily in states that Democratic candidates typically short-change or ignore ... thereby forcing McCain to spend precious money on the defense of red-state turf and making it all the more difficult for McCain to compete effectively in traditional battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Parenthetically there were also some internal tactics in play, observed Polman: "Obama is aware that some Democrats still question whether he's a fighter; Hillary Rodham Clinton's pitch was that Obama was too much of a dreamer to win. So his decision to defy public financing is aimed at them as well."

Polman then repeated the key to Obama's larger strategy, however, which, quite aside from the issue of public financing, is the subject -- the ultimate point -- of the column you're now reading: "Maybe Obama's halo has been dented a bit, by his own hand, but most Democratic voters are in no mood to indulge idealism. In their hunger for victory, they're willing to swallow a lot."

Just as progressives -- standing distinctly to the left of "most Democratic voters" -- should be.

The "lot" they must be willing to swallow but have so far resisted includes, for instance, Obama's stand on objectionable legislation such as the electronic surveillance bill (complete, probably, with telecom immunity), as well as objectionable policies such as, say, Obama's support for corn ethanol, as reviewed [2] rather disapprovingly on the front page of the NY Times this morning.

Both examples dwell in the politics of the now, not eternal principles. With ethanol, there are Midwest farm states; with the surveillance bill, there is Virginia, or Georgia, or North Carolina -- and it's as straightforward as that.

Expanding the electoral map through a 5-to-1 financial advantage doesn't do much good without some center/center-right bona fides to plausibly compete in those center/center-right states.

If there is to be a progressive Obama administration, then the central -- read center -- player must play accordingly from now through November, just as FDR did in 1932, just as JFK did in 1960, and just as WJC did in 1992 (but unfortunately never stopped).

In short, progressives should get off Obama's back. He is, as Polman correctly noted, "simply doing what it takes to win." Progressives should follow suit and swallow their vocal idealism -- precisely as they did on public financing -- until the prize is won. Then they can hammer him leftward -- although he's already there and is only trying to strategically hide it as best he can.