FIRST EVENING UPDATE:  JULY 3,  2008

Posted at 8:32 p.m. ET

BRITS ON BARACK

I've said in this space that the British journalists covering the U.S. often do a sharper job of commenting on our elections than do the Americans.  And one of the sharpest of the Brit reporters is Gerard Baker of The Times of London.  Here he examines Barack Obama's remarkable dance from left to center, a dance perfected in the last two weeks:

Change, it turns out, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Having campaigned for the past year as the agent of transformation, the man who would lead an historic shift in America's political direction, Barack Obama is discovering that there is quite a lot he likes about the way things are.

Since securing the Democratic nomination a few weeks ago, the only change coming from the Illinois senator has been in what he seems to stand for...

...If next week he named Dick Cheney as his running-mate and revealed that he spends his spare time drilling for oil in wildlife habitats, the only surprise would be that it took him so long.

Do you observe a knife going in? 

Of course there's nothing much new in what the senator has done. In the lexicon of modern American politics, it's called a pivot. You campaign hard to the party's extreme in the primary election, where the base voters tend to be. Then, when the nomination is secure and there are no more idealists to be humoured, you pivot back to the centre. The only difference is that in Mr Obama's case the pivot is so hard and so fast that the entire Democratic Party is suffering from whiplash.

A whimper of pain has gone up from the base. Those who really believed in the Audacity of Hope now fear a Timidity of Despair.

And the obvious:

I suspect that all this worries Mr Obama not at all. The louder the Left complains, the deeper the satisfaction at Obama headquarters.

Can you remember a time in, say the past 100 years, when the American people have rejected a presidential candidate because they thought that he was insufficiently left-wing? As for conservatives, they should be cheering Mr Obama, not complaining.

Well, yeah, but the problem is determining what Obama actually believes.  At this point he can be anywhere from Jane Fonda to John Wayne. 

...On the issues, as Mr Obama understands, people are not so radical. On domestic prosecution of the War on Terror, on cultural issues such as guns and the death penalty, on religion's role in public life, perhaps even on trade and free markets, there is little evidence that Americans are ready to abandon their beliefs.

This is another example of how smart the Obama campaign is. They understand that the biggest impediment to an Obama presidency is lingering doubt about whether their man is a straight-down-the-middle American.

And the doubt still lingers, and will linger until he gets into office, if he wins, and lays out a program as president, not as candidate.

But there is a risk in all this repositioning. Mr Obama will almost certainly have to junk a lot more of the campaign baggage he has accumulated over the past year.

Two big plans look especially vulnerable. The first is his tax policy...

...The other challenge is Iraq. Mr Obama continues to insist that Iraq is a failed war and says that he will withdraw all US combat troops within 16 months of taking office. But the closer the election gets, the less plausible it will be to refuse to acknowledge the success that US forces have had in Iraq in the past year.

If, as I suspect is highly likely, he drops these two big remaining planks from his platform, it might not just be the Left who will be wondering: what's left?

Well, Obama might just be taking a page from the John F. Kennedy playbook.  In 1960, Kennedy actually ran to the right of the Republicans on national defense, assuring Americans that he, a young man and a sometime-liberal, would defend the country even better than the incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general.  Kennedy won, and was generally hardline toward the Soviet Union.

After their smugness about Obama earlier this year, it's kind of fun to see the leftoids squirm a bit.  May the squirming continue.

July 3, 2008.      Permalink          

SECOND AFTERNOON POST:  JULY 3,  2008

Posted at 4:54 p.m. ET

TRACKERS

Both our standard trackers have now been published for the day.  Rasmussen continues to show Obama up five over McCain.  Gallup, which yesterday showed Obama dipping to a two-point lead, today shows him with a four-point advantage. 

Thus, all recent polls pretty much agree.  Obama is four to five points ahead of McCain.  That's not much of a lead, but it's remained remarkably stable.  In my view, stability is an advantage for Obama.  McCain, one of the best-known of senators, is not gaining on him, and Obama has had a few bumpy weeks.

We await two developments:  First, we await the results of the McCain staff shakeup that occurred earlier this week.  Second - and I dread it - we await Obama's foreign tour.  You may be sure that his advance men are already planning the ways to get those whipped-up European crowds into the street.  Just imagine the TV pictures here.  American greatness restored.  For thirty seconds at least.

But Obama will also go to Iraq.  I can't imagine him getting much of a reception from our troops there.  After all, he's essentially declared their mission a mistake.  One possible opening for McCain would be for him to go to Iraq afterward.  Presumably, he'd get a much warmer cheer.  Would that affect American opinion at home?  I would hope so, but I'm far from sure.  The people who care about troop morale are probably already for McCain.  But maybe he could gain something in respect - a point or two.  Everything helps.

July 3, 2008.      Permalink           

AFTERNOON POST:  JULY 3,  2008

Posted 1:54 p.m. ET

A MIRACLE?

I'd missed this, for some reason, this morning.  But my friend John Catherwood alerted me to a New York Times piece that actually holds out hope for America.  It seems that a generation of academics is poised to retire, and their replacements...well, read on:

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.

“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”

When you finish this piece, go immediately to a house of worship and drop to your knees.  If this doesn't prove there's a God, I don't know what will.  

There are signs, there are signs:

At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military. 

And more signs:

...a new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

Do you feel the presence of miracles?

“My generational paradigm is the end of the cold war,” said Matthew Woessner, a 35-year-old conservative and political scientist at Penn State Harrisburg. He and his wife, April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at nearby Elizabethtown College who is a year younger and a moderate, have been analyzing faculty survey responses for a new book. The notion that campuses are naturally radical or the birthplace of social movements, Ms. Kelly-Woessner said, was specific to the 1960s and ’70s. “I think the younger generation does look at it differently.”

Oh, read the whole thing.  I'm just overwhelmed with the audacity of hope.

July 3, 2008.      Permalink          

THURSDAY:  JULY 3,  2008

Posted at  6:58 a.m. ET

THE REAL BARACK?

Michael Gerson, columnist for The Washington Post, and formerly a speechwriter for President Bush, calls Barack Obama cynical, and compares him, unfavorably, to the last two presidents:

It is a very conventional bit of political wisdom that successful presidential candidates appeal to their base in the primaries and sidle toward the center in the general election. In fact, neither of the past two presidents won in this fashion.

In the Democratic wilderness years following Mondale and Dukakis, Gov. Bill Clinton labored for the ideological renovation of his party, emphasizing education reform and job training, economic growth and expanded trade, reform to make welfare "a second chance, not a way of life," law and order, and mainstream moral values.

And...

In 1998, another reform-minded Southerner, George W. Bush, was reelected governor of Texas with 68 percent of the vote on a platform of "compassionate conservatism" -- at the same time Gingrich-Armey, government-shutdown Republicanism was taking a national beating. Bush was the most prominent Republican advocate of education reform that benefited minority children, inclusive immigration policies, and community and faith-based answers to social problems such as addiction and homelessness.

And...

Whatever you think of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both earned a reputation for centrism by taking difficult political stands during (and before) the nomination process. While remaining orthodox on many key issues, each candidate contributed a new intellectual theory to his party. And the candidates forced Democratic and Republican ideologues to swallow a horse pill of centrism in the cause of victory.

That is correct.  There's an old saying that, in politics, Americans play between the 40-yard lines.  America is an idealistic nation, but, in general, shuns rigid ideologies.  It is part of the genius, and pragmatism, of American politics. 

Barack Obama is now making his head-snapping shift to the center precisely because he rejected the Clinton-Bush approach...

...All this requires its own kind of audacity. As Obama explained of his NAFTA switch, "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified." There is a broad wink in this admission -- a signal to the political class that Obama gets the political game. And commentators who buy the conventional wisdom -- that all politicians excite the base, then move to the center -- find these shifts expected, even impressive.

No more talk about a new kind of politics.  Now it's Obama the pro, Obama the streetwise pol, the messiah entering the smoke-filled rooms.

There are many excuses for political opportunism, but it is not a virtue, because it eventually multiplies cynicism. And it may not even be a political advantage for a candidate who has made post-partisan idealism -- rather than a policy vision -- the centerpiece of his campaign.

It also adds to the notion that we don't know this man.  If he had a long record, we could determine where he stood on most issues.  But his biography is two paragraphs, and he had a habit of voting "present" in the Illinois state legislature - not a mark of courage or commitment. 

Stand by.  At the rate he's going, Obama will soon be quoting from the Ronald Reagan handbook.  And loving it.

July 3, 2008.      Permalink          

THE RECORD

It isn't only the switching of positions that has Obama observers snapping their heads. It's his claims, now enshrined in TV ads running in a number of states.  Newsweek (yes, Newsweek!) did some checking, and the results will not earn Mr. Obama the "integrity" award at the next school assembly.  No need, senator, to wear the white shirt with the red tie.  You won't be called up.  Consider:

Obama's latest ad repeats an often-stated claim, saying he "worked his way through college and Harvard Law." We know Obama took out loans to get himself through school. But the campaign provided information on just two jobs Obama had in those years, and they were both in the summer.

The ad also says he "passed a law to move people from welfare to work, slashed the rolls by 80 percent." Actually, the Illinois law was a required follow-up to the 1996 federal welfare reform law worked out by President Clinton and the Republican Congress. Welfare rolls did go down by nearly as much as the ad says, but Obama can't claim sole credit.

The audacity of hype.

We asked campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor if Obama held jobs during the school year, or other summer jobs, but he said only, "He had the two jobs I told you about." Unless Obama had a good bit more employment than his spokesman was able to describe for us, it's a real stretch to claim he "worked his way" through school.

Accusing a saint of stretching things?  Infidel.

And what about that welfare bill?  More heresy:

And far from having "passed" the bill single-handedly, Obama was among five Senate sponsors of the measure, as we said previously. It was passed by both chambers of the Illinois Legislature and signed into law by the governor.

Welfare reform was successful in moving people off public assistance. There was about a 78 percent drop in the number of families receiving public assistance in Illinois between 1998 and 2006. But we don't think Obama alone, or even Obama and the four other sponsors of the Illinois law, can take credit for all of this. It was the federal law, hammered out by Clinton and the Republican Congress, that set the wheels in motion and forced states to act.

These journalists.  Tearing down a saint.  They're so anti-religion.

It goes on like that.  As each day passes, Obama shows himself to be a pretty conventional politician, eloquent to be sure, and highly intelligent, but conventional. 

Will it matter?  As we've seen with past presidents, voters are willing to forgive a great deal if a candidate possesses other qualities they seek.  Look what they forgave in Bill Clinton - virtually his entire assault on the Ten Commandments.  The prevailing view seems to be that this will be an election about Obama.  I tend to agree, although events in the news may change that perception.  But if it is about Obama, then Senator McCain must define Obama in far sharper and more disturbing terms than he's been willing to do.

McCain shook up his staff yesterday.  Now maybe we'll see some swift political action.

July 3, 2008.      Permalink          

IRAN MOVEMENT?

Benny Avni of The New York Sun is emerging as one of the most astute reporters on foreign affairs, especially our conflicts with rogue regimes.  Here he examines the latest on Iran.  Some detect signs of movement in Tehran.  But Chamberlain detected signs of movement from Hitler, so we'd best be careful:

UNITED NATIONS — Despite widespread speculation that a military attack against Iran is being considered, the country's foreign minister is saying he does not believe that America and Israel are positioned politically to carry out such a military "adventure" against the Islamic Republic this year.

While President Bush said yesterday that all options are on the table, he added that he has "made it very clear to all parties that the first option ought to be to solve this problem diplomatically." The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, went further, warning against a destabilization of the region and opening up a new military front in the Middle East.

And...

European diplomats, saying they could already hear "new language" coming from Tehran, dangled a new offer designed to coax Iran into negotiations, an offer which could override an earlier demand for verifiable suspension of uranium enrichment.

But Iran watchers in Israel saw little new content in Iran's recent statements and warned against any erosion in Western demands.

And...

Nevertheless, diplomats said a reported recent Israeli air force exercise over Greece, described as a "general rehearsal" for a military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities, may have changed minds in Tehran.

Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign adviser to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said recently that Iran should "consider" Western offers, and he cautioned fellow Iranian officials to cool their rhetoric on nuclear issues.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere.  You mean a credible threat of force, combined with advanced military exercises, may get people to thinking?  Why, I would never know it reading much of the mainstream media.

But the American ambassador to the UN makes clear that this country expects full suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment program:

"There is a need for suspension, and that suspension needs to be a verifiable suspension," the American ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, said yesterday.

And Israeli experts aren't buying talk of a new atmosphere.   Ephraim Sneh, a much quoted Israeli defense authority:

"This is the old Iranian tactic," said Mr. Sneh, who is one of Israel's most quoted officials on Iranian issues.

While Iranian officials "send one trial balloon after another, spinning Western diplomats, the centrifuges at Natanz are spinning and spinning as well, producing enriched uranium at an ever faster pace," he said. "The West is allowing itself to be cheated."

Hate to be a pessimist, but, if I had to make a choice here, I'd guess that the Israeli will turn out to be correct.  He has the history of the mullah regime on his side.

July 3, 2008.      Permalink