Obama's pretensions of moderation

Rich Lowry:

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Obama is able to get away with all this because he has a thin record that the press is unwilling to examine. In the Illinois Legislature, he voted against legislation protecting infants born alive after abortions - votes so outrageous the press acts as if they simply couldn't have occurred. Obama can reinvent himself at will, a political Gatsby with all of America as his East Egg.

If elected, Obama will return to Washington with expanded and emboldened liberal majorities in both the Senate and the House - and Congress was the un-doing of his two Democratic forebears.

Jimmy Carter was stiff-necked with a Democratic Congress, and that made it nearly impossible for him to govern. Clinton accommodated his Democratic Congress in 1993-94, and it pulled him to the left - to devastating effect in the 1994 congressional elections.

For a President Obama, moderation could no longer be merely a pose that represents the path of political least resistance; he'd have to fight for it every day with partisan colleagues who are older and tougher than he is.

When has Obama stood up to liberals and fought for a principled centrism? Never. That's why part of McCain's closing argument must be that he'd be a better check on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid than the moderate poseur.

The media is not delving into this record because it is in on the scam. It is willing to go along with the fraud of Obama's pretensions of moderation because it knows it is necessary to fool the voters into electing their guy.

I have had several posts about the "dismissive sentence" that the media inserts to deal with the issues raised by Joe the Plumber. That dismissive sentence was what the frantic digging was all about when Joe raised his issue about Obama's tax policy. They could construct numerous dismissive sentences about Obama if they did the same kind of digging in his record. They don't and they wont because it si against their interest to have Obama lose.