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Jul 14, 2008 08:28 PM by James Bowman
Last week, Gail Collins of The New York Times offered a novel defense of Barack Obama’s rightward dash for votes since clinching the Democratic nomination last month. It was that he really hadn’t changed at all but was only saying what he had been saying all along. We just weren’t listening. Ridiculous as this may sound to those of us who seem to remember having been wearied by all the rhetoric about "change" and a "different kind of politics," there may be something to her contention. For you could easily say that the vagueness, the tautologies, the — pardon me — meaninglessness of the Obama rhetoric ("We are the change we seek") are all just another way of saying that he wants to be all things to all people. His post-nomination transition is thus just the flip — sorry — side of his pre-nomination pandering to the base by leaving out anything controversial, or even substantive. Both are his way of saying: I can be anything you want me to be. But I think that Ms Collins must be mistaken when she writes of the senator that
But all wars are dumb wars so long as you think — as Senator Obama has sought to make it his trademark to show he thinks — that war can be avoided by being smart. It’s not very smart not to realize this, as the Senator apparently does not. In any case, he’s not antidumb anymore, at least not to judge by today’s Times in which he stupidly proposes to toss away the hard-won fruits of victory in Iraq on the grounds that going there in the first place was "the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy" — as he had foreseen it would be when, unlike Senator McCain, he had opposed the invasion in 2003. He does not mention that he also foresaw that the surge would have no effect on the level of violence in Iraq, even though he is now constrained to acknowledge that "in the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence." Can there be a dumb peace as well as a dumb war, I wonder? Or is the Senator only "antidumb" when it suits him to brag about his own foresight? He must at least be hoping that the rest of us are dumb enough not to notice that whether he was right or wrong in 2003, as only the event will prove, we know already that he was dead wrong in 2007.
Where’s a fellow to find a good flip-flop when he needs one? Oh, I forgot. The official position is that he has always said the same thing — and he has been right all along.
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