The ever-malleable Mr. Obama
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:18:10 -0700 (PDT)
The ever-malleable Mr. Obama
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | "To be clear: Barack will support a
filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for
telecommunications companies."
— Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007
That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be
seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now
says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom
companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.
Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed
the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a
renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico and threaten
unilateral abrogation.
Today the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric
"overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic
advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was
nothing more than populist posturing.
Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet "without
preconditions" with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be
"preparations," you see, which are being spun by his aides into the
functional equivalent of preconditions.
Obama's long march to the center has begun.
And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even
mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush,
anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their
day of revenge — for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all
the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the
past eight years.
Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about
the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his
grandiloquent Philadelphia speech — designed to rationalize why "I can
no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white
grandmother" — then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second
coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned,
grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a
word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.
Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from
lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press.
Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash,
he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out.
Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream
editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing
as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of
disappointment.
Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of
Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a
preemptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups —
notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes,
"there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any
immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent
ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-
MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.
True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological
reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money
is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press
claimed to hold dear.
As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly
dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the
least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never
had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his
media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an
equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line
overnight — switching sides in World War II, for example — whenever
the wind from Moscow changed direction.
The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician
(though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it
plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what
politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.
When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom
accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard,
Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.
Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in
Philadelphia — only to haul her back on deck now that her services are
needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving
Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy
get-to-know-me national TV ad.
Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's
finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.
.
- Prev by Date: Security and Freedom
- Next by Date: Bill Clinton: Obama has to 'kiss my *&%!'
- Previous by thread: Security and Freedom
- Next by thread: Bill Clinton: Obama has to 'kiss my *&%!'
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
