Mocking Obama — Left, Right and Center

I have said this before but Obama is in the unenviable position of getting attacked from the left, right and center. No doubt, McCain is in the same position with critics on all sides, however, the attacks on Obama are harder hitting and more prevalent. Moreover, the attacks seem to be having an effect on Obama’s polling numbers. Where McCain’s numbers seem to be holding steady, Obama’s numbers are not. His negatives are on the rise. Trust, or the lack there of, has become a big issue for Obama. It’s not an issue for McCain.

When it comes to the economy, 47% of voters trust John McCain more than Barack Obama. Obama is trusted by 41% down from 47% a month ago. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey also found that, when it comes to the War in Iraq, McCain is trusted more by 49% of voters. Obama is preferred by 37%. McCain has an even larger edge 53% to 31%–on the broader topic of National Security. In terms of likely voters, McCain has been polling around 42% to 45%. Obama has been over 50% but now he is just above and within the margin of error McCain according to a Newsweek poll out last week.

So let’s check out the mocking of Obama from the left, center and right.

Here’s a video from Liberty News, a progressive news outlet, attacking Obama.

A ho-hum meeting of the Barack Obama campaign team gets an unexpected visit from a fact wielding, sword carrying, butt-kicking progressive.

Funny stuff, really unless you’re Barack Obama, then I am sure it isn’t too funny. It is anybody’s guess what percentage of the progressive left abandons Obama but I think it fair to say that the number will be larger than those who abandoned John Kerry. Nader is polling near 6% and he is hoping to be on the ballot in forty-five states. I personally think that the Green Party is making a mistake with Cynthia McKinney but it is possible that the hard left of the anti-Iraq War movement might find a home there. How many progressives may not even vote? Obama thinks he can overcome this by increasing the African-American participation and by pursuing the youth vote.

In the above video, I must say that I enjoyed the peak oil moment. There’s a reason I focus so much on energy and transportation. It is the one problem we have to solve. Not to discount the seriousness of other issues, but energy makes our lifestyles possible and to be frank we need to get Americans out of their cars five days a week by investing massively in public transit so that the overwhelming number of Americans are not commuting to work in their cars. For those of us who focus on energy, Obama is a real challenge. We haven’t forgotten that Obama, and not McCain, voted for the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy. What does that tell you?

From the center, there’s Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News who asks in an op-ed Will the real Obama please stand?

The headline in The Washington Post was intriguing: “Obama’s Ideology Proving Difficult to Pinpoint.” The article turned out to be a charitable discussion of whether the Democratic nominee is moving away from leftist positions he took during the primaries and toward the political center for the general election.

Of course he is. Enough to produce, as someone put it, whiplash. So let’s give the topic a headline that directly addresses the doubts: Just who is Barack Obama?

Is he the inspirational juggernaut of the early primaries, the man who promised “change we can believe in” and a new era in American politics? Or is he one more politician whose actions often contradict his words?

Put another way, what does he believe in?

Damned if I know.

Once upon a time, I thought I did. Obama was the graceful rookie from Illinois who came out of nowhere to become the rock star of ’08. His biracial heritage, Harvard Law School education and vast ambition created the perfect image of a post-racial, post-ideological agent of change. He would not be tied to the old ideas or the old ways of doing things.

It was a promise, exquisitely delivered, that allowed him to grab an early delegate lead and hold on to narrowly defeat Hillary (The Invincible) Clinton.

But there were hints Obama was not what he claimed.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a big one. By the end of the primaries, Obama was stumbling and on the defensive. And now he has become yet another candidate altogether in the post-primary period.

On defining issues – security wiretapping, gun control, campaign finance, Iran and Iraq – he has done partial or full about-faces. Hardly a day goes by that he doesn’t attack John McCain in typical partisan fashion.

And when he denies with a straight face that he’s changing anything, Obama gives new meaning to chutzpah.

The changes have been so dramatic that many liberal activists are expressing buyers’ remorse. Some are demanding their contributions back and vow not to support Obama until he adopts his old positions.

For me, a centrist Democrat and a hawk on security, most of his new positions are better than those he abandoned. But they’re not believable. They create doubts about whether he has core beliefs.

Someone who can shift positions so quickly on so many important issues that will face the next President comes off as a man who doesn’t have fixed convictions. Pragmatism has to be guided by principles. A man who believes in everything believes in nothing, and that’s a formula for chaos in the White House.

Yes, I know, McCain has gone back and forth on tax cuts, immigration and some other issues. But McCain is a known quality. His POW heroics and his long career in Washington are universal fixed points of reference.

Like him or not, we think we know who John McCain is. It’s a belief that doesn’t depend exclusively on specific positions. As long as his policy shifts are few and explainable, the sense of who he is remains intact. It’s something to trust.

Obama, without points of reference and a long career, doesn’t have much room to maneuver. He is also limited by his promises of sweeping change in both results and process.

As William Galston of the Brookings Institution told The Post: “Successful campaigns tell stories that provide the framework of meaning and significance for particular policy proposals.”

In other words, policies are expressions of the narrative and must be consistent with it. They are the meat on the bones.

That’s where Obama has failed. In his rush to appeal to moderate voters, Obama has demolished his narrative. Political expediency is ordinary, and by embracing it, he has proven himself an eloquent but ordinary politician.

That’s who Barack Obama is.

Let’s review. Goodwin finds Obama’s march to center not believeable even though Goodwin finds many of Obama’s new positions preferrable. My favourite paragraph:

Someone who can shift positions so quickly on so many important issues that will face the next President comes off as a man who doesn’t have fixed convictions. Pragmatism has to be guided by principles. A man who believes in everything believes in nothing, and that’s a formula for chaos in the White House.

I have been saying the same thing for months. Obama has no core convictions other than his own political welfare. Glad to see you catching up with me. His inexperience is in my view likely to cause crises. While McCain is irascible, Obama panders uncontrollably. That’s why he can tell the Palestinians that he will take a hard line on Israel but then tell AIPAC that Jerusalem must forever remain the undivided capital of Israel, even though that’s not US policy.

But Obama is also being mocked in other less subtle ways in the media. Have you seen this week’s cover of the New Yorker?

Ouch. Talk about a picture painting a thousand words. That cover will lose Obama at least 100,000 votes, maybe more. I doubt it will gain him one.

On the right, I could have chosen any number of op-eds but I am going with the learned Charles Krauthammer. I find most right-wing pundits blathering idiots. Charles Krauthammer, John McLaughlin and Pat Buchanan are my three exceptions. I don’t necessarily agree with, more often, I don’t but they are thought provoking. This is a column in Washington Post on June 27, 2008:

“To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

– Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007

That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he’ll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.

Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take “the hammer” to Canada and Mexico and threaten unilateral abrogation.

Today the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric “overheated” and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.

Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet “without preconditions” with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be “preparations,” you see, which are being spun by his aides into the functional equivalent of preconditions.

Obama’s long march to the center has begun.

And why not? What’s the downside? He won’t lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won’t stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge — for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the past eight years.

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.

Obama is closer to being finished than many would like to think. I have really never thought that Clinton might be rehabilitated back into the nomination picture. Now I’d say people might be thinking, it is time to start looking for a way out of Obama.