Anna at Dakota Women has a good post on Obama, with some references to Schaff and myself. Anna directs our attention to a very good article on Obama in the New York Times. Here is the point:
I would suggest that our South Dakota Politics friends are sort of right and sort of wrong about Obama. The article suggests something that I've long suspected about him - he's whatever he needs to be, depending upon the people to whom he is trying to appeal. When he's courting the liberal/radical Democratic activists in Hyde Park, he holds liberal views - he's pro-Palestinian, for example. When he starts running for statewide office, and needs to gain the political and financial support of the ardently pro-Israel Crown family, his opinions change, they change pretty significantly, and he leaves his old allies in the dust.
This is certainly a plausible reading of Obama's career, but it leaves us with a question.
Contrary to popular opinion, there is nothing wrong with a candidate shifting his presentation with different audiences. Politics is all about forming coalitions, and that means finding out what people in different places want. Abraham Lincoln talked a lot differently about the issue of his time, slavery, in Southern Illinois than he did in Northern Illinois. But this was always in the service of a fixed agenda: to resort the Missouri Compromise and stop the expansion of slavery in the territories. Everyone knew where he stood on those things. Does Obama have such an agenda? If so, no one knows what it is.
By contrast there was William Jefferson Clinton, who was everything to everybody because he had no agenda beyond scripting himself into a made for TV movie. Anna clearly thinks that Obama is a Clinton more than a Lincoln.
My reading of this [New York Times] article is undoubtedly colored by my bias in this race, but what I see here is a desire for power, entirely separated from any core set of personal beliefs, or any real sense of purpose beyond enjoying political power and wanting to move further up the ladder.
Anna may well be right about that. Here is a bit of the NYTs piece:
For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1990s peace talks. Mr. Khalidi said the talk would often turn to the Middle East, and he talked with Mr. Obama about issues like living conditions in the occupied territories. In 2000, the Khalidis held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama during his Congressional campaign. Both Mr. Khalidi and Mr. Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, said Mr. Obama had spoken at the fund-raiser and had called for the United States to adopt a more “evenhanded approach” to the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
Still, Mr. Khalidi said ascertaining Mr. Obama’s precise position was often difficult. “You may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” he said. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”
That sounds like our boy Bill to me! Still, I can't helping noticing that Obama has been shedding anti-Israel advisers lately like wool blankets on a warm night. This is political expediency, but the fact that he had so many of these folks hanging around confirms my thesis: Obama is more at home with advisers to the Palestinians and to Hamas with anyone who is friendly to Israel. Obama the man, as opposed to the politician, would be the most radical leftist we have ever put in the White House, if indeed we put him there.
If Anna is right that Obama the politician has no core agenda beyond ambition, it may be so for an odd reason. I don't think the left really has plausible and coherent policy proposals on most of the important questions. Like Senator Clinton, he has lots of expensive policy proposals, but won't commit to the tax policies that would be necessary to fund them. He talks against free trade, then sends his advisers to Canada to assure them he don't mean it. His energy policy? Tax big oil, but don't drill any new wells. It is hard to have a core agenda when you have no ideas that have not been tried and refuted.
I note with some embarrassment that Bill Clinton was one of our most successful Presidents in terms of policy. I am not sure that Senator Clinton would not have made a fair President for the same reason. But that, I think, we will never know.
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