Back when Barack Obama was running for the Democratic nomination, I thought my problem with him was that he was too liberal. A National Journal survey listed him as the most liberal Democratic senator in 2007. (National Journal, January 31, 2008) His speeches talked about unity and bridging differences and bringing us together*, but his positions and his votes were from the left wing of the Democratic Party. Even Senator Obama’s once-famous speech on race (given when he was still refusing to abandon the Rev. Wright) concluded with an appeal based on a standard set of liberal Democratic policies. He was talking unity, but his positions and his votes were left-liberal.
But now that he is the "presumptive" Democratic nominee (is that like when the news media calls somebody an "alleged" criminal?), things are changing.
In 2006 Senator Obama voted against both the Alito and Roberts nominations to the Supreme Court. In fact, when he voted against Roberts, only half of the Democrats in the Senate voted with him. The other half supported the Roberts nomination.
But a couple of weeks ago, Senator Obama agreed with Roberts and Alito when they voted, in a 5-4 decision, to invalidate the District of Columbia’s handgun ban and read an individual right to bear arms into the Second Amendment. He also agreed with Roberts and Alito when they dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision that it was unconstitutional to impose the death penalty in cases of the rape of a child.
In Ohio, before he had clinched the nomination, he said NAFTA cost us a million jobs. Since becoming "presumptive," he has said his rhetoric on trade was "overheated."
My initial reaction to all this was to think Senator Obama was a flip-flopper. But I’m not sure that is it. It may be that he does not know what he thinks on a lot of issues. After all, he hasn’t been a Senator that long. Robert Samuelson described Obama this way:
"[Obama] strikes me as a super-successful graduate student; the brightest, quickest, most articulate guy in the seminar. In his career, he has advanced mainly by talking and writing – not doing – and may harbor a delusion common to the well-educated that he can argue and explain his way around any problem."**
Which means this: We know that Senator Obama is good at giving speeches and that he sounds good when he talks. But will he be the unifier of his speeches, the left-wing liberal of his 2007 Senate votes, or the middle-of-the-road politician who agrees with Roberts and Alito on the Second Amendment? I don’t know. And nobody voting for him in November will know, either.
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* Another politician who said his goal was "to bring the American people together" was –- Richard Nixon. (See here.)
** This may be why Obama said last summer that he would meet with the leaders of North Korea, Iran, and Cuba in his first year as President without preconditions. Maybe he thinks it is just a matter of people sitting down and talking it out –– or maybe that was just what he was saying before he clinched the nomination.
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Update (7/13/08 8:20 p.m.): The parenthetical in the second paragrpah was changed.
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