Obama is running on the promise of change
Trouble now is, some of his supporters see him changing some of his promises. As he appeals more to moderates and independents, liberal Democrats are finding his new outreach unappealing.
This AP analysis claims the Republicans are taking advantage of Obama’s change. It’s clearly written by one of his supporters, but all things in perspective, it makes some interesting points about the candidate.
On Iraq, Obama said Thursday that his upcoming trip there might lead him to refine his promise to quickly remove U.S. troops from the war.
He now supports broader authority for the government’s eavesdropping program and legal immunity for telecommunications companies that participated in it, supporting the bill after some protections were added.
The handgun control proponent reacted to the Supreme Court overturning the District of Columbia’s gun ban by saying he favors both an individual’s right to own a gun as well as government’s right to regulate ownership.
Obama became the first major-party candidate to reject public financing for the general election after earlier promises to accept it.
He not only embraced but promised to expand Bush’s program to give more anti-poverty grants to religious groups, a split with Democratic orthodoxy.
And the big one:
Obama also said “mental distress” should not count as a health exception that would permit a late-term abortion, saying “it has to be a serious physical issue,” addressing a matter considered crucial to abortion rights activists.
Back to that in a minute…
The AP analyst sounds more like an apologist, which we get a lot in the American media on behalf of the Illinois senator.
Obama’s problem on Iraq isn’t that he is changing his position drastically, because he isn’t…
His problem is that his change in emphasis to flexibility from a hard-nosed end-the-war stance — including his recent position that withdrawing combat troops could take as long as 16 months — will now be heard loud and clear by an anti-war camp that may have ignored it before. So he could face a double-whammy in their feelings of betrayal and other voters’ belief in the Republican charge that he is craven.
It was Obama’s messy series of comments Thursday, coming after weeks in which Republicans had been goading him to change his withdrawal policy in light of reduced violence, that put an unfortunate spotlight on his quandary.
There’s the giveaway. This is “an unfortunate spotlight on his quandary” for…whom? Obama, his campaign, his supporters and fans. Including those in the media. That they see it as such is revealing of how much trouble the senator is getting in for “tacking to the center”, as one television news analyst put it.
So is he more centrist that we thought? Or is he becoming more centrist than he was? Or….is this really a sincere and lasting “change in emphasis”, as the AP calls it, as opposed to politically expedient comments on the campaign trail? We don’t yet know.
On that remark about limits to health exceptions in partial birth abortion ‘rights’, Creative Minority Report is skeptical.
