By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, June 27, 2008
 
"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.

Just like the repubs to recruit their favorite toadie Krauthammer to fire the opening salvo in their desperate attempt to define Obama as a flip-flopper. And if that doesn't work they can get Karl Rove to swift boat him. yada yada yada.

June 28, 2008
Emulating the Man From Hope
By Toby Harnden
 
Republicans with a predilection for wishful thinking had been supposing that John McCain's opponent in November was going to be another Jimmy Carter or Mike Dukakis. But although Barack Obama might not have been able to get him on the phone this week, the new Messiah of Hope has been doing a passable of emulating the Man from Hope.
 
 
In January 1992, Bill Clinton flew back from the campaign trail to Arkansas to send Ricky Ray Rector to his Maker. A retarded double murderer who had lobotomized himself with his own gun, Ray told his guards to save the pecan pie from his last meal so he could finish it after the lethal injection.
 
The execution enraged the Left. By 2002, the Supreme Court had ruled that such state killings were unconstitutional. Clinton's sanctioning of it may have reeked of cynicism but it was masterful politics.
 
Still fresh in the memory was Dukakis's bloodless and bureaucratic answer to Bernard Shaw of CNN's debate question about whether he would back the death penalty if his wife Kitty was raped and murdered. At a stroke, Clinton proved that he was no Dukakis.
 
Obama's a Mid-western senator rather than a Southern governor so he won't have the opportunity Clinton had to fly back home to order the execution of a retarded man. But he did have the next best thing this week - the Supreme Court's 5 to 4 decision that quashed the execution of a Louisiana man who raped his eight-year-old daughter.
 
Without a blink, Obama aligned himself with the Court's four conservative justices - John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito - who had voted to uphold the death penalty for child rape. The father of girls aged nine and seven, he seized the opportunity to display populist revulsion and take a hard line against a despicable crime. Not for him the cool rationalism of Dukakis.
 
The following day, Obama had another chance to align himself with Scalia and Co rather than Stephen Breyer, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg - the kind of justices he's indicated he favors.
 
Showing a determination not to become another Al Gore - whose opposition to gun rights arguably cost him the 2000 election - Obama spoke warmly of the decision to overturn the District of Columbia's handgun ban.
 
Throw in his jilting of the Netroots by supporting the FISA bill and his decision to abandon his pledge to seek a public funding deal with McCain and it's clear that Obama is determined to appeal to the Centre and elements of the Right.
 
Ensuring he's covered all bases with respect to losing Democratic presidential candidates, Obama's also been doing his best to prove he's no John Kerry. Giving notice he won't be Swiftboated, he said last week that "if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun".
 
Cue howls of derision from the Left and cries of, 'What happened to the politics of hope?' That's a legitimate question. But after Carter, Walter Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry what Democrats want most is a winner. Having already cornered the market on hope and change - no matter what Obama does, McCain's not going to take that away from him - he needed to prove he was tough enough.
 
To have accepted public funding and its accompanying spending limits would have been an insane act of unilateral disarmament. Yes, there's a danger of Obama sullying his hopemonger reputation and coming across as just another politician. But who has ever won the White House without being political?
 
Obama has worked deftly to court Hillary Clinton and her voters without deferring to them and appearing weak. While telling female members of the Congressional Black Caucus to "get over it" might have been going a touch too far, his reminder that Camp Clinton had portrayed him as a Muslim and not ready to be commander-in-chief.
 
By refusing to bow to the new Conventional Wisdom that poor Hillary fell victim to a wave of Obama-inspired sexism, he solidified his position as Democratic alpha male.
 
Although the media's working assumption has been that this will be a general election as close as those of 2004 and 2000, there are signs that Obama is building the foundation for a resounding victory. Four months is an eternity in politics and anything can happen but McCain supporters are right to be gloomy at the moment.
 
Some national polls give Obama a sizeable lead. But more worrying for Republicans are the state polls, which show Obama having an edge in Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Michigan with Florida, Missouri and Nevada within striking distance. Should the currrent state polling trends continue, Obama could be headed for a landslide in November.
 
Meanwhile, McCain seems strangely off form. While telling reporters that he was "very pleased" with the Supreme Court's gun decision, he looked barely happier than he did when being held prisoner in Vietnam. An emerging storyline of a man who never uses the internet and takes weekends off - though heaven forfend anyone making his 71 years an issue - needs to be nipped in the bud before it begins to define him.
 
Bill Clinton wasn't in Unity, New Hampshire yesterday when Obama and his wife staged their show of togetherness. And it may be quite some time before we see the former president stumping for the Illinois senator.
 
Obama secured the Democratic nomination in part by disavowing the "old politics" of Bill Clinton. But the way he's begun his general election campaign shows that he's convinced that emulating the Man from Hope is the way to win in November.
 
Toby Harnden is US Editor of The Daily Telegraph of London. His blog is at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/tobyharnden
 
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I can't wait until January 2009.
 
--SoCo