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Obama: The Refined, Artful Candidate

In two impressive columns, last week and this week, Charles Krauthammer has chronicled a large number (but not all) of Obama?s reversals of field, changes of direction, modifications of principle, etc., on major issues.

• In the fall, he opposed retroactive immunity for telecom companies who assisted in anti-terrorist monitoring, even threatening to filibuster. Now he supports it.

• In the fall, he trashed NAFTA. Now he calls his previous opposition ?overheated? and supports it.

• In the fall he promised to meet with the likes of Iran?s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ?without preconditions.? Now there will be ?preparations,? and he may not meet with Ahmadinejad anyway.

• In the fall he promised to accept public financing and abide by spending limits if the Republicans would. Now he has abandoned that pledge and continues to raise tons of unaccountable cash in record amounts.

• In the fall he was no more able to disown Rev. Wright than his own grandmother, but then he ditched both of them, dissing the former as ?a typical white person? and proclaiming, much like Rick Louie the Gendarme in the presence of gambling in Casablanca, that, after 20 years of listening to Rev. Wright, he was shocked by what he had just heard.

• In the fall he told the Chicago Tribune that he thought the Washington, D.C., gun ban was constitutional. Now he supports the Supreme Court?s decision that it was not, forcing his campaign spokesman to admit that Obama?s earlier support for the constitutionality of the gun ban was ?inartful.? (DISCRIMINATIONS definition: an ?inartful? statement is one supporting a previous commitment that is no longer convenient.)

• And here?s a flip-flop not mentioned in either of Krauthammer?s columns: In the fall, and before, Obama has always supported civil unions but opposed same sex marriage, believing marriage is between a man and a woman. Now he supports the California Supreme Court?s decision that his former view of marriage is unconstitutional, and he opposes the California initiative that would re-establish the view that he formerly held, describing it (the initiative and presumably its definition of marriage) as ?divisive and discriminatory.?

• In the fall Obama promised to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq ?immediately? and to be altogether out in 16 months. Now he is ?refining? that position. Indeed, he now even refers to his long-held support for immediate withdrawal as his ?original position,? which reminds me of a man referring to his ?first wife? ... while he?s still ostensibly married to her.
  

Obama, of course, has always been right, and remains so even when he jettisons unpopular people and positions for new, more popular ones. He?s like General McClellan, who explained (as discussed here) after one of his retreats that he wasn?t retreating but merely ?changing his base,? to the delight of his adversaries.

The spirits of the Confederate soldiers were good. Northern newspapers had reported McClellan?s description of his withdrawal to the James as a ?change of base,? and when the story got to the men, they would loudly laugh at the loser of a dog fight and call out: ?Look at him changing his base!?

As Obama continues to ?refine? his various ?inartful? positions, always with great eloquence, he is well on his way to becoming the presidential candidate with the most, er, flexibile principles and policy commitments since ... John Kerry and his voting for before voting against.

UPDATE

A New York Times editorial discusses a few of these and several other examples of the New Obama throwing the Old Obama (that is, the one from six months ago; there?s no Obama of any significance older than that) under the bus, and is not pleased.

We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama?s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.

In other words, the Times?s editors have finally noticed a few glaring disjunctions that others have long seen, such as a passive (at best) consumer of Rev.Wright?s anti-American passions promising to bring us together; a politician who has never strayed from the left wing of his party promising to bring us bi-partisanship; a bi-racial candidate saying

There?s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there?s the United States of America

even as he continues his past support for preferential treatment of black and Hispanic Americans at the expense of white and Asian Americans.

I could, and in the future no doubt will, go on.

Full post as published by Discriminations on July 04, 2008 (boomark / email).