Obama has changed his position so many times in order to pander to everyone, even conservatives, to the point where he has last any credibility he had.
Obama Playing Voters for Dupes
By
Rich Lowry
A signature moment of Barack Obama's primary campaign came last
November in Des Moines, Iowa. He gave a speech at the Jefferson-Jackson
Dinner that electrified the crowd and gave his campaign a kick that
helped win the Iowa caucuses -- a victory without which he wouldn't be
the Democratic nominee.
Obama declared that "the same old Washington textbook campaigns just
won't do." Deploring "triangulating and poll-driven positions," he said
that "telling the American people what we think they want to hear
instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just
won't do." The Democratic Party had been at its best, he told the
crowd, when "we led, not by polls, but by principles; not by
calculation, but by conviction."
"I run for the presidency of the United States of America because
that's the party America needs us to be right now," he vowed, staking
his candidacy on the achingly idealistic premises of a new, more
forthright and uncalculating politics.
What makes Obama's "textbook" dash to the center so extraordinary is
not just its speed, but how it falsifies the very essence of his
candidacy. It's as if Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in
1992 and announced suddenly that actually he was not a "new kind of
Democrat"; or if George W. Bush, after winning his party's nomination
in 2000, forswore "compassionate conservatism"; or if John McCain,
after winning the GOP nomination this year, declared in favor of a hard
deadline for withdrawal from Iraq.
In the past few weeks, Obama has broken two pledges (to take public
financing in the general election and to filibuster legal immunity for
telecoms that cooperated with the government in terrorist
surveillance); has belittled his own rhetoric during the primary
campaign (saying it could get "overheated and amplified" on the issue
of trade); redefined his promise to meet without preconditions with the
leaders of hostile states until it's basically meaningless; endorsed a
Supreme Court decision striking down a Washington, D.C., gun ban his
campaign had previously said he supported; and made muddy,
centrist-sounding statements about his positions on Iraq and abortion
that he had to go back and try to clarify.
Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation
and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both?
We now know that Barack Obama is not naive, but his ardent supporters
are. Obama exhorted them to "believe" -- one of his favorite words --
in him and his virtue above all, and as soon as they gave him the
nomination he wanted, he showed how foolishly credulous they had been.
When it comes to triangulating, he's Hillary Clinton without the
baggage.
RCP Article