Obama's politics of fraud

Rich Lowry:

A signature moment of Barack Obama's primary campaign came last November in Des Moines, Iowa. He gave a speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner that electrified the crowd and gave his campaign a kick that helped win the Iowa caucuses -- a victory without which he wouldn't be the Democratic nominee.

Obama declared that "the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won't do." Deploring "triangulating and poll-driven positions," he said that "telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won't do." The Democratic Party had been at its best, he told the crowd, when "we led, not by polls, but by principles; not by calculation, but by conviction."

"I run for the presidency of the United States of America because that's the party America needs us to be right now," he vowed, staking his candidacy on the achingly idealistic premises of a new, more forthright and uncalculating politics.

What makes Obama's "textbook" dash to the center so extraordinary is not just its speed, but how it falsifies the very essence of his candidacy. It's as if Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992 and announced suddenly that actually he was not a "new kind of Democrat"; or if George W. Bush, after winning his party's nomination in 2000, forswore "compassionate conservatism"; or if John McCain, after winning the GOP nomination this year, declared in favor of a hard deadline for withdrawal from Iraq.

In the past few weeks, Obama has broken two pledges (to take public financing in the general election and to filibuster legal immunity for telecoms that cooperated with the government in terrorist surveillance); has belittled his own rhetoric during the primary campaign (saying it could get "overheated and amplified" on the issue of trade); redefined his promise to meet without preconditions with the leaders of hostile states until it's basically meaningless; endorsed a Supreme Court decision striking down a Washington, D.C., gun ban his campaign had previously said he supported; and made muddy, centrist-sounding statements about his positions on Iraq and abortion that he had to go back and try to clarify.

Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both? We now know that Barack Obama is not naive, but his ardent supporters are. Obama exhorted them to "believe" -- one of his favorite words -- in him and his virtue above all, and as soon as they gave him the nomination he wanted, he showed how foolishly credulous they had been. When it comes to triangulating, he's Hillary Clinton without the baggage.

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Obama broke in front of Hillary Clinton when she was caught doing what he is doing now on several issues. Here is what Peggy Noonan wrote at about the time of Hillary's slide:

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Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn't back it, she then called it a good start, or rather "I support and admire" the person proposing such a tax for his "willingness to take this on."

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.

But the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase "command and control." They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren't rich, who aren't protected, the old "my friends and I know best, and we'll fill you dullards in on the details later."

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That is a pretty apt description of the post nomination Obama. Whatever he says, in your heart you know he is left. His supporters also know it. The only one who may be fooled are the ones in the mushy middle. I think Obama has surpassed her on quadruple talk too.