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But the two changes of heart this week illustrate that there's a difference between changing your policy position and breaking a promise. McCain's altered stance on drilling (and the windfall profits tax) opens him up to charges that he's pandering and has no core principles. The damage his drilling plan might do to the environment recedes as a secondary critique. When Obama first reacted to McCain's proposal, he never mentioned the environment, but framed it as a weakness of leadership: "It's another example of short-term political posturing from Washington, not the long-term leadership we need to solve our dependence on oil."
But if these flip-flops reflect character attributes, then it's Obama who emerges more vulnerable. Breaking a promise is a problem of a higher order than changing a policy position. Our mothers told us not to break promises; they were silent on the question of drilling.
Read the whole piece to understand how Dickerson believes that Barry Hussein-O is an opportunist rather than an agent for REAL change.
WaPo's Krauthammer has a less benign view of Barry & this crushing verdict on a squishy-soft mainstream media puppy-love infatuation with Obama:
Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.
Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.
Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.
True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.
As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.
The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.
When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.
Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.
Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.
Re Obama, the MSM has accepted the two Communist mantras that old-time SDS Commie Mark Rudd told me when he was my houseguest in Ann Arbor almost forty years ago:
"No Fault on the Left" and
"Dare to Cheat, Dare to Win."
Barry has certainly assimilated that Marxist/Leninist catechism verbatim.
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