The Wall Street Journal editors remind us that Van Jones was a well-known figure on the Left whose views and associations were not exactly a secret:

He has been a leading young light of the left-wing political movement for many years. His 2008 book—”The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems”—includes a foreword from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and was praised across the liberal establishment.

Mr. Jones was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which was established, funded and celebrated as the new intellectual vanguard of the Democratic Party. The center’s president is John Podesta, who was co-chair of Mr. Obama’s transition team and thus played a major role in recommending appointees throughout the Administration. The ascent of Mr. Jones within the liberal intelligentsia shows how much the Democratic Party has moved left since its “New Democrat” triangulation of the Clinton years.

As the editors contend, the reason the Left is so upset both about his demise and the fact we are now hearing so much about him is that the mask of moderation that Obama used to get elected is once again fraying. We know such a figure would never have wound up in a truly “moderate” president’s administration. And we know that at the first hint of his way-out-of-the-mainstream views, any other administration would have sacked him immediately.

The editors conclude:

The rise and fall of Mr. Jones is one more warning that Mr. Obama can’t succeed on his current course of governing from the left. He is running into political trouble not because his own message is unclear, or because his opposition is better organized. Mr. Obama is falling in the polls because last year he didn’t tell the American people that the “change” they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and appointees with the views of Van Jones.

So it’s easy to see why the administration doesn’t want to talk about it, the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover it, and the Left blogosphere is outraged that Obama “caved” by letting go one of their own (not that he was a radical, mind you!). Meanwhile, the gap widens between the president’s actual political leanings and his spin (in which anyone who challenges his agenda is the radical). It is all the more troubling for the administration that this comes at the very time the president is trying to tell us he is the paragon of moderation on health-care reform.

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