A few months ago, I sent an instant message to a prominent liberal blogger asking him about Jim Messina, then President Obama's chief of staff. Messina was going to be the manager of the re-elect, and I knew that his reputation among the Netroots wasn't solid. This blogger responded quite quickly: Messina was unacceptable, an enemy of the cause (I'm paraphrasing because I don't save my IMs) and he would be a political target before he could ascend to the post.)

Well, we're about a week and a half away from that moment, and Messina is still the manager-to-be. He met this week with White House chief of staff Bill Daley to discuss the campaign roll-out, someone familiar with the meeting told me. (Messina declined to comment.)

But Messina isn't out of the woods. The Nation's Ari Berman published an article about Messina, calling him Obama's "enforcer."

The piece is unflattering. The Messina that emerges is illiberal, difficult to deal with, an obstacle to progressives, opposed to gay rights, and responsible for all the things about the health care bill that progressives didn't like.

It begins with an anecdote about how the Campaign for America's Future informed Messina that it plans to run television ads urging Blue Dog Democrats to sign on to the massive budget that President Obama was proposing in 2009, the year of the Great Fiscal Collapse.

Writes Berman: "If the group wanted to join the Common Purpose Project, an exclusive weekly strategy meeting between progressive groups and administration officials, CAF had to drop the campaign. We know how to handle the Blue Dogs better than you do, Messina said."

Now, this happened. And Blue Dogs continued to throw up thickets of thorns whenever Obama wanted to get something big done.  So what are we to make of the incident?

On the one hand, it tells us something about Messina's personality. Sometimes he's not terribly cuddly. It also says something about his belief in the strategy he was executing: it was pretty strong. It also suggests that Messina is not fond of the politics of demonstration, a trait he happens to share with the man who has entrusted Messina with significant and difficult tasks--and will now look to him to get re-elected: Barack Obama.

Indeed, the story that Berman tells is really a story about progressive discomfort with the way the Obama administration treats Washington-based progressive groups and their tactics. It is a well-reported litany of complaints the left has against Obama's style of interacting with them.

But who is Messina? Is he really an obstacle to progressive reform inside the White House? Was he responsible for the health care strategy that ultimately, well, led to a bill, but a bill that lacked a Medicare buy-in or a public option. Was he responsible for the Don't Ask, Don't Tell strategy, which--well, succeeded, even at the (cost?) of Messina alienating several prominent gay rights activists?

You'd think it would be easy to write a defense of the man who will be the campaign manager for the president's re-election bid. After all, a reporter doesn't want to alienate a great source, so of course, the "Village" (a collective consciousness that apparently infects the press corps), will rush to his defense.

My intent isn't to defend Messina. He is capable of doing that himself.

It is to point out that, on the cosmic scale of politically significant problems for progressives, Messina's fidelity to liberal values is curious to focus on.

What people don't focus on is Messina's mission and the guy who sends him on the mission: Barack Obama. Messina's personality aside (and we will come back to it in a second), every complaint that liberals have about Messina (and that Berman puts in the article) are complaints they ought to have about Barack Obama, because it was Obama, the President, who set the strategy and who endorsed Messina's particular tactics.

Robert Creamer is a legendary figure in Democratic politics: an organizer par excellence. He is one of Messina's biggest defenders. I asked him why Messina was subject to the ire of liberals.

"He is on occasion pretty direct with people. I guess that's part of it," Creamer says. "But I spent a lot of time pounding on him to do this, and not to do this, and I found that he was able to accept positions that were different from mine."

To the complaint that Messina kicked people out of meetings who pursued tactics that he found unhelpful--well, that's true. "One thing about Jim is that he is a guy who, if you cross him, he remembers it. "

"But that's the other side of his being loyal," Creamer says. And when it comes to the duties Obama entrusted to him, Messina was almost always successful.

Here are a couple of things that I have independently confirmed about Messina:

1. He supports gay marriage, putting him to the left of the President, who does not.
2. He pushed internally for the public option, and was lobbying Sen. Joseph Lieberman to accept a Medicare buy-in provision that progressives had proposed--losing that fight because the insurance lobby was more persuasive, apparently.
3. Messina had to do what amounted to a secret end-run around Vice President Biden's staff in order to pressure Harry Reid to keep Don't Ask, Don't Tell, from falling victim to a secret compromise on the START treaty.
4. When the White House decided that it would pursue a health care strategy that would allow the Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus to craft a bipartisan proposal, Messina was given the task of keeping his former boss, Baucus, in check. In this Messina did not succeed; the White House underestimated the degree to which partisan Republicans would unite against health care. Maybe this says something about Messina's ability to handle Baucus, but it says nothing about Messina's intent or beliefs about health care.
5. Messina was among those pressing internally for the White House to go after the insurance industry (to make it their health care foil) earlier than they did. (Obama, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod thought that keeping the insurance industry from running advertisements opposing the health care plan would be a masterstroke. They turned out to be wrong; the industry was plotting against the bill all along.

Now, progressives who wrote about the health care logjam in realtime predicted that the Baucus approach would fail and that the insurance industry would never really sign on to health care. They were right, and the White House was wrong. In the end, of course, health care passed--an incredible feat that owes as much to the patience of progressives as it does to anything the White House did.

It is hard, however to find any evidence that Messina was ever going it alone, or was freelancing, or was somehow using his influence with Baucus to shape the health care bill to a more conservative end. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but the worst about Messina that can be said is that he was following orders.

I have elsewhere written about Don't Ask, Don't Tell: no need to repeat it. Ask even critics of Messina what they think of his role in the battle, and they give him props.

The biggest substantive indictment seems to be that Messina worked for Max Baucus, and that Max Baucus voted for the war in Iraq, the Bush tax cuts, and, as mentioned above, messed up health care.

But then Messina played a large role in the Democratic campaign to defeat President Bush's efforts to privatize Social Security in 2005.

It is hard to see how Democratic voters will find this associational guilt particularly compelling.

Messina is sensitive about the way he is perceived by liberals, I am told by his friends, because he considers himself one. He is also wary of what Robert Gibbs once called the "professional left"--very much adopting a strategy that pursues an endgame that doesn't necessarily involve feel-good waypoints for Democrats. But that's--and this cannot be stated enough--that's Barack Obama's strategy. That's what Obama wanted. Obama. The President.  Berman's titular contention that he is Obama's "enforcer" is a better way of looking at the situation, although the emphasis ought to be on Obama. OBAMA's enforcer.