Obama, a man of expiring commitments

Michael Crowley:

During the Democratic primary season, all those eons ago, Barack Obama deployed no more powerful line against Hillary Clinton than his insistence that 'we can't just tell people what they want to hear. We need to tell them what they need to hear'. More than just a catchy couplet, the phrase was a deadly arrow into the heart of Clintonism.

Few things crippled Hillary's campaign like the belief that she would say or do anything to get elected, from supporting the Iraq War to claiming she'd dodged sniper fire at Tuzla. In Obama, Democrats seemed to have found something refreshing: a brave truth-teller unmoored to pollsters such as Mark Penn, someone who had spoken out against Iraq the war and could at last restore integrity and honesty to Washington politics.

But since Obama dispatched Clinton, he has seemed rather more attuned to what the people want to hear or perhaps he has simply traded the wants of a liberal audience for those of a more moderate one. Either way, he is treading that reliably time-worn path every nominee follows to the political centre. And the question for Democrats is whether to applaud Obama as a cunning politician who knows how to win or fret that he's given undecided voters reason to think his 'politics of hope' are just politics as usual.

First, let us count the repositionings. This past week, Obama expressed surprising disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the death penalty for child rapists (he had previously questioned the rationale of capital punishment). He resisted criticising another high court ruling that affirmed gun owners' rights, even though he had previously seemed to support the gun-control measure at issue.

Obama also dropped his once-stern opposition to a Congressional measure, despised on the left, that would legally shield telecommunications companies that co-operated with extra-legal US government eavesdropping. To some, even the contents of Obama's iPod, recently revealed to Rolling Stone, smacked of political calculation, combining as it did Baby Boomer classics (Stones, Springsteen, Dylan) with highbrow jazz (Coltrane, Miles Davis) mindless top 40 pop (Sheryl Crow) and edgy-but-not-too-edgy hip hop (Jay-Z, Ludacris). Perhaps this playlist should be titled 'Majority Coalition'.

In truth, Obama has been creeping towards the sanitised centre for a while. After disdaining American flag lapel pins last year, he now wears one regularly. When Jeremiah Wright, his controversial former pastor, provoked outrage in March, Obama insisted he could not 'disown' him, but proceeded to do so just a few weeks later with a public condemnation.

Obama now concedes that his sharp criticism of free trade agreements such as Nafta before industrial-area primary voters might have been 'overheated'. He's toughened his talk on Iran and in favour of Israel. He's even shaded his rhetoric on Iraq, downplaying his primary season vow to withdraw all US combat troops within 16 months for more careful talk of a gradual and 'responsible' exit.

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Obama has gone from a man of inspiration to a man of expiration of commitments. Still he has both sides hanging on thinking there the one he really supports. He is like a guy with two different lovers who has managed to convince both that they are the one. The fact is like most guys in that circumstance neither is the one because he knows that deep down he is the only one who matters. The audacity of arrogance MovesOn.