For a certain species of progressive, the Democratic Party will never come to grips with the urgency of deep structural change unless it gets over its infatuation with Obama, whose centrist instincts and pro-corporate associations made his presidency nearly as bad as George W. Bush’s. The highly influential Open Markets Institute thinker and agitator Matt Stoller is often beside himself on the subject of Obama’s perfidy and the party’s refusal to acknowledge it…

And some Obama defenders have more or less risen to the bait, lauding him for the centrist restraint he imposed on a party that, left to its own devices, might have kicked and brayed itself into irrelevancy, and scoring his successors for caving to the Left.

As Bill Scher observed at Politico, the intra-Democratic debate over Obama has been “happening sotto voce, with critics trying to criticize Obama without maligning him personally — or even mentioning him.” Stoller is an exception in that respect. But it is generally accepted that Obama was anything but a fiery progressive, for good or for ill.

It’s fascinating, then, to recognize that on the political Right, Barack Obama is still something of a devil figure, and most definitely a lefty extremist.