Blowing In The Wind

Newsflash!  Republican's are in to recycling.   Who knew?  And spoken by the master flip-flopper McCain himself so he can try and distract the populace all the times he's changed his mind in his decades long pursuit of being master of the free world.   According to McCain, a politician's word can't be trusted.   I can't tell you how surprised I...wasn't.  Almost without exception, a politician's goal is to get elected.  Then it's to be reelected and the naive fall for it every time, believing that the the next guy who promises them change will be the "one", when in reality the change the politician is talking about is to turn the power of the position they are campaigning for over to themselves.

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'.

I almost feel sorry for the those who have swallowed this election's Kool-Aid.  McCain is dangerous but there is no guarantee that Obama will appoint judges that are beneficial to women.  In this regard he is just like Bush.  All talk (albeit much more intelligently) about changing America for the good, with  no actions to back it up.  In Obama's favor, at he hasn't signed any death warrants, but on the other hand  he isn't willing to defend the Fourth Amendment.   If for no other reason that that he is a black male, he should fight this latest attempt to remove all expectations of privacy in one's home.

The next few months should be pretty interesting as the base who got Obama where he is, is discarded in favor of a center that doesn't exist except to the pollsters.

I'm being brave.  Number one, I've taken a less than popular view on the anointed one and two, I'm trying out some of the new features from Blogger in Draft.