From the beginning, Barack Obama's special appeal was his vow to remain an idealistic outsider, courageous and optimistic, and never to shift his positions for political expediency, or become captive of the Inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia, or kiss up to special interests and big money donors.

In recent weeks, though, Obama has done all those things.

He abandoned public campaign financing after years of championing it. Backed a compromise on wiretap legislation that gives telecom companies retroactive immunity for helping the government conduct spying without warrants. Dumped his controversial pastor of two decades - then his church - after saying he could no more abandon the pastor than abandon his own grandmother.

He said he wouldn't wear the U.S. flag pin because it had become a substitute for true patriotism, then started wearing it. Ramped up his courtship of unions. Shifted from a pledge to protect working-class families from tax increases to a far more expensive promise not to raise taxes on families that earn up to $250,000 a year. Turned to longtime D.C. Democratic wise men to run his vice-presidential search and staff his foreign-policy brain trust.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the publisher of the liberal blog Daily Kos, called the wiretap compromise a "really craven flip-flop" meant to immunize Obama against efforts to paint him as weak on national security.

But he defended Obama's withdrawal from public financing as legitimate because Republicans aren't committed to curbing independent attack ad spending.

Dumping Rev. Wright and the church was a flip-flop, he said, but an understandable one given the intense - and one-sided - media coverage of the flap.

Moulitsas admitted that he worries a lot about whether he can count on Obama to stay committed to quick troop withdrawals from Iraq. It's not that Obama has given him any cues to that effect, he said, but rather that, "He's a politician, and things change with politicians, at the end of the day."