One thing you can say for Barack Obama's craven flip flop on the Farm Bill, noted below by Jon Schaff, is that at least you know what Obama is now saying he would do. Having once opposed the atrocious bill, he is all for it now that he has to try to win farm country voters; but I suppose that means that he will vote to override the current President's veto and sign such legislation if he becomes President.
By contrast, a Congress of Talmudic Scholars larger than Obama's pledged delegate count couldn't determine the meaning of his position on negotiating with Iran. Marc Ambinder, blogging at The Atlantic.Com, tries a little exegesis on the Hyde Park Hero's oracular pronouncements.
It's clear now that Obama would not... within the first year of his administration, meet directly with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without "preconditions" and without equivocation. It IS clear that Obama would meet with Ahmadinejad (or Ali Khamenei) without forcing Ahmadinejad (or Ali Khamenei) to provably suspend uranium enrichment. It's also clear that Obama would be more willing to meet with these leaders than McCain.
Obama's campaign now uses the word "with preparation" as shorthand to refer to diplomatic advance work; other advisers use the word "unconditional" as a straw man to suggest that critics are accusing Obama of wanting to meet "unconditionally" with these leaders -- of course their would be "conditions" -- there just wouldn't be "pre-conditions." (Would there be .... post-conditions?)
Ambinder shows in detail that the Obama organization has been utterly incoherent on at least two things: 1) who he would meet with and when he would meet with them, and 2) whether there would be "preconditions" for the meeting, and what sort of conditions these might be.
Why the conceptual stammering? It may be that common problem for politicians: how to take back something you said weren't thinking, without admitting that you weren't thinking or even that you said what you said. But sometimes these gaff-induced tailspins reflect some underlying contradiction that a candidate can neither resolve nor acknowledge. Ambinder puts his finger on this one:
Obama wants to draw a much brighter line between his approach to Iran and North Korea's and the Bush administration's approach to those countries.... A political trap awaits Obama in this sense: how to best distinguish your diplomatic approach from President Bush's.... that requires a very very wide gap between the two approaches ... and how to reassure Americans that Obama does not believe in the messianic power of his own rhetoric and would not be willing to let Iran run roughshod over the United States? That requires a slightly narrower gap. After all, there _are_ low level and mid-level (and even senior level) contacts between Iran and the United States right now; the Bush Administration is negotiating with North Korea.... [my italics].
Obama wanted to show that his approach to these problematic polities would be dramatically different from that of George W. That's why he originally said he would sit down and talk without preconditions. The trouble is, there just aren't a lot of practical policy options available to a President, and the reasonable alternatives differ marginally at best from what the current President is doing.
Obama's critics (including, apparently, President Bush) charged him with advocating appeasement of dictators. That may or may not have been unfair, but it had the affect of showing that Obama's policies will either be wacky (see Jimmy Carter) or they will be pretty much the same as the ones we have now. Whatever this is, it isn't change that we can believe in.
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