|
by Paul R. Hollrah,
Lincoln Heritage Institute Senior Fellow
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In discussing Obama’s many recent flip-flops, it was either Charles Krauthammer or Bill Sammon on Fox News a few days ago who said that Obama’s Democratic support is “crumbling beneath his feet.”
His trip to Iraq promises to be an absolute circus. Either he loses his far-left support or he loses his centrist, blue-collar, working-class support. He can’t have it both ways; and Katie Couric, Charles Gibson, and Brian Williams will not be able to bury the story – they’ll all be there to report on it.
Watching Barack Obama sprint full speed from the far left to the center has my head spinning! But I suspect that I’m a bit more supple, physically, than John McCain because I didn’t spend five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war hotel where the room service guys broke bones for sport. So how does McCain keep up with Obama’s policy shifts? He doesn’t.
In the time that McCain pauses in the middle of a response to a reporters question to take a couple of swigs of his latte (is anyone coaching this guy?), Obama has reversed himself on at least two more major policy positions – policy positions that he previously used to wring some $332 million out of the gullible tin-hat dilettantes of the far left.
For example, after being a gun control advocate for his entire political career (I have socks in my drawer, without holes, that I was wearing eight years before Obama first ran for public office), he now applauds the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Washington, D.C.’s ordinance banning the possession of handguns. Since D.C. is the murder capital of America, one wonders whether Obama has calculated the loss in Democratic voter registrations once the law abiding citizens of Washington arm themselves and start blowing away the bad guys.
During his years in the Illinois State Senate, Obama was a dedicated supporter of abortion, early term and late term. On two occasions he voted against amendments that would have required doctors performing abortions to have a second physician in attendance if they suspected that an abortion might result in the birth of a live infant. The amendments also would have declared that a live born infant resulting from an abortion would be “fully recognized as a human person.” Obama would have those children wearing t-shirts saying, “I’m not a real person?”
However, in a recent interview, Obama softened his hard pro-abortion stance a bit. Speaking of what qualifies as the “health of the mother” in late-term abortions, he said, “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother…”
Obama has also come a long way around on the question of faith-based initiatives in which churches would assist in the delivery of government-funded social services – a major Bush Administration initiative that was universally condemned by liberals and Democrats. In a recent speech in Zanesville, Ohio, Obama said that America’s problems are too great to solve through government programs alone. As a former “community organizer,” he said, “I believe that change comes not from the top down but from the bottom up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.”
Mosques? While emphasizing that those receiving funds could not proselytize or discriminate on the basis of religion, if he truly believes that a Christian or a Jew could walk into a mosque and be hired to participate in a government-funded outreach program, or that Muslims would not use every dollar to promote the spread of Islam, he is far more naïve than anyone has ever given him credit for. However, in a major departure from longtime Democratic Party orthodoxy, he did insist that taxpayer dollars would only go to “programs that actually work.”
Earlier in the campaign, Obama challenged the Republican nominee to join him in accepting federal funding for the General Election campaign. But now that someone has figured out how to sneak a couple hundred million dollars into the his campaign treasury, flying undetected under the Federal Election Commission radar, Obama is no longer excited about federal funding. He now claims to have developed a contributor base of some 1.5 million people. Of course, that was enough for him to announce that the size of his contributor base amounted to “true public financing…” give or take 299 million people.
Speaking at a town hall-style meeting in Powder Springs, Ga., on July 9, Obama said, “Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center. The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.”
Yes, people have been listening. It’s just that what they hear depends on which day they were listening. That’s why his far-left base is so angry with him, why his June fundraising fell $33 million short of expectations, and why centrists and conservatives are scared to death of him.
Politically, Obama is the personification of the guy whose wife caught in bed with another woman. While hopping around the room on one foot, trying to get his pants on and looking for an escape route, he exclaimed, “Who, me? What woman? Who are you gonna believe…me or your lying eyes?”
While denying that he is rushing to the center for the General Election, Obama argued, “I believe in personal responsibility; I also believe in faith. That’s not something new; I’ve been talking about that for years.” Then, as he waved his hands in a circle above his head, he continued, “So the notion that this is me trying to look centrist is not true.”
Anyone who believes that will believe…well…almost anything else that Obama says.
|
