The main problem I can see with ‘hard’ as a political descriptor is that it conflates two seriously different phenomena. Especially when paired with ‘left’ or ‘right’, there’s a subtle tendency to confuse people with hardline political beliefs from people with a firm commitment to one party or cause or the other.

As a solution, I propose that we use ‘hard’ only to describe the politics, and as for the partisanship we use ‘firm’. It’s a distinction whose time has come, especially with the Republicans dissolving into firm holdouts, with both the hard and soft Right seeming to lose faith in the party organization after Bush and McCain.

Similarly, when the Obama knuckle-under on FISA happened, we saw an interesting divide along the same lines play itself out: firm Democrats generally accepted it, and even rationalized the idea. This includes commentators to the left of Obama himself – Olbermann, say – and excludes even commentators roughly in the political center.

Our tendency to mistake hardline politics for ideological fervor is one of many unfortunate products of domination by one party whose candidates can’t be hard-right enough and one party whose leadership treats hard politics as a sort of demonic possession. The American electoral system accepts the firm right and left, but only the hard right – the hard left shuffles from third party to third party, and it takes us threatening to riot to get the DNC to actually pay attention to us like they do the right-wing Southron idiots voting Democratic out of tribal allegiance.

Incidentally, and speaking only for myself, I endorse what Jeff Rowland said on the subject – that is, Obama pissed me off pretty bad, but he’s still a damned sight better than anyone else currently running. Here’s hoping it’s just an electoral gimmick.