Obama's Pretzel Logic
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 27, 2008
Barack Obama is under hostile fire for changing his position on the D.C. gun ban.
Oh, I'm sorry. He didn't change his position, apparently. He reworded a clumsy statement.
That, at least, is what his campaign is saying. The same campaign that tried to spin his flip-flop in rejecting public financing as embracing the spirit of reform, if not the actual position he had once promised to embrace.
Is this becoming a pattern? Wouldn't it be better for Obama to say he had thought more about such-and-such an issue and simply changed his mind? Is that verboten in American politics? Is it better to engage in linguistic pretzel-twisting in an effort to prove that you didn't change your mind?
Regardless of what you think of the merits of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling overturning the capital's handgun law, it seems to me we're entitled to a clear position by the presumed Democratic nominee. And I'm a bit confused about how the confusion came about.
Here's how the Illinois senator handled the issue with the Chicago Tribune just last November:
"The campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he ' . . . believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.' "
Kind of a flat statement.
And here's what ABC reported yesterday: " 'That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator's consistent position,' Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News."
Inartful indeed.
But even though the earlier Obama quote and the "inartful" comment have been bouncing around the Net for 24 hours, I'm not seeing any reference to them in the morning papers. Most do what the New York Times did: "Mr. Obama, who like Mr. McCain has been on record as supporting the individual-rights view, said the ruling would 'provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.' "
Supporting the individual-rights view? Not in November.
Even the Tribune--the very paper that the Obama camp told he supported the gun ban--makes no reference to the November interview. Instead: "Democrat Barack Obama offered a guarded response Thursday to the Supreme Court ruling striking down the District of Columbia's prohibition on handguns and sidestepped providing a view on the 32-year-old local gun ban. Republican rival John McCain's campaign accused him of an 'incredible flip-flop' on gun control."
So McCain accuses Obama of a flip-flop, and the Trib can't check the clips to tell readers whether there's some basis in fact for the charge?
USA Today takes the same tack:
"In a conference call put together by McCain's campaign, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said . . . that Obama has been changing his position on the gun issue and said the Democratic senator has done some 'incredible flip-flopping' on key issue."
And? And? That's all we get? He said/he said journalism?
Even if you wanted to maintain that it wasn't really a flip-flop, what about giving the readers the facts?
The Washington Post did include this half-sentence deep in a story: "Obama, who has advocated strict gun-control laws and who spoke favorably about the District's handgun ban before yesterday's ruling . . ."
New York Post columnist Charles Hurt suggests the appearance of a reversal by the "most liberal member of the Senate," but doesn't provide the evidence on this point:
"Obama may as well have strapped on his John Wayne chaps and holster yesterday to announce his support of the Supreme Court's decision that the Second Amendment guaranteeing gun rights actually means what it says . . .
"As Obama moves rightward and gets tougher, Republicans are desperately trying to portray him as some sort of arrogant flip-flopper. But these audacious moves by him are not signs of weakness; they're signs of a man who will win at any cost.
"Isn't that what they used to say about the Clintons?"
The conservative blogosphere, however, brings out the heavy guns. Hot Air's Ed Morrissey points out that Obama is, after all, a lawyer:
"Barack Obama has been spinning like a top, and watching his positions on, well, just about everything is like watching table-tennis matches on TiVo triple fast forward. FISA, public financing, and NAFTA have all been reversed in the last couple of weeks, and Obama's not through yet . . .
"Suddenly, with the general election looming, Obama discovers that his campaign's statement was inartful. This seems rather puzzling, because before he ran for public office, Barack Obama was supposed to be a Constitutional law expert. One might expect the 'inartful' excuse on wetlands reclamation or some other esoteric matter of public policy, but the Constitution is what he supposedly studied at Columbia and Harvard."
Red State: "May I suggest that Senator Obama start putting a 'Freshest if used by' date on all his speeches? It'd be a help, really."
Flopping Aces says the timing is a bit coincidental:
"Every flippin day we get more evidence that Obama is the worst flip-flopper to have come along in sometime . . .
"Puhlease. 'Inartful?' Either you believe the ban was constitutional or not. Simple question. His spokesperson said he did believe it was constitutional and he never corrected this statement until the day of the decision."
Not seeing much on the liberal blogs. HuffPost had a big banner headline but nothing about Obama's shift. Here's a post from Newshoggers:
"In today's political climate, flip-flops and smarmy attempts to spin now-abandoned positions of principle as 'inartful' are more harmful than just going against the national grain might be. I understand that Obama wants to move toward the center now that the primary is over and the general must be fought, but inartfully doing so won't help. He needs to rediscover his spine."
The court rulings makes this Time essay by Jay Newton-Small particularly timely:
"To some observers, Obama's transformation from upstart candidate to presumptive nominee has made him begin to look dangerously like the typical Washington politicians he so often rails against. Worried about his patriotism? He now wears a flag pin daily. Worried about his church? He left it. Think he's inexperienced? Don't fret; he's got lots of renowned advisers. Too liberal? Well, just look at his recent policy statements on defending Israel and protecting warrantless wiretapping.
"And for a man who last week flip-flopped on his pledge to stay within the public financing system, Obama's planned meeting with Hillary Clinton's fat-cat donors seems to be his way of saying, 'I may not like your game, but I'll take your money.'
"Certainly this kind of seasonal shifting of messages isn't new for a presidential campaign, in which candidates typically move to the fringes to appeal to their party's all-important base in primaries and the center to appeal to crucial moderate and independent swing voters in the general election . . .
"In some ways Obama has boxed himself in: in trying to counter criticisms about his experience, he's brought in a team full of gray-haired advisers who, by dint of their long-established positions and Washington relationships, represent the furthest thing from change.
"The shift hasn't just been cosmetic. The liberal blogosphere lit up angrily when Obama signed on to a controversial Senate compromise to authorize President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping programs last week."
One former White House official has been doing his best to paint Obama as a country-club snob. Karl Rove continues the assault in the WSJ, starting with O's now-scrapped, presidential-looking seal:
"Such arrogance -- even self-centeredness -- have featured often in the Obama campaign . . . Mr. Obama has now also played the race card, twice suggesting in recent weeks that Republicans will draw attention to the fact that he's black. Who is unaware of that? Americans overwhelmingly find it a hopeful, optimistic sign that the country could elect an African-American president. But they rightly want to know what kind of leader he might be. They may well reject as cynical any maneuver to discourage close examination of him by suggesting any criticism is racially motivated.
"The candidate's self-centeredness has been on display before. Having effectively sewed up the Democratic nomination, he could have agreed to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations (states Hillary Clinton had carried). While reducing his lead by 50 to 55 delegates, it would not have altered the outcome. But Mr. Obama supported cutting these battleground-state delegations in half. At a time when magnanimity was called for, the candidate decided he'd strut . . .
"Mr. McCain will be helped if he uses Mr. Obama's actions to paint his opponent as someone driven by an all-powerful instinct to look out only for himself." |
