After eight years of George W. Bush’s ruinous policies, the American people are aching for change. The change we seek isn’t a cosmetic change but a fundamental one. We want our government to start working for us. Most of all, we want our leaders to be honest with us, to give us the “straight talk” that so many politicians pontificate about but always fail to deliver.
Enter Sen. Barack Obama. The junior senator from Illinois swept us off our feet with his electrifying oratory and soaring vision for the country. Back in January, we enthusiastically endorsed Obama because we believed he was the candidate of change. We believed he was a different kind of politician, one who would forsake politics-as-usual and instead value authenticity over focus groups and polls. We believed he could bridge the political schism and cure the color-coded polarization dividing the nation into red and blue states. Most importantly, we took him at his word when he said he would redeploy our troops from Iraq as quickly and safely as possible, thus ending the most egregious foreign policy misadventure in American history since Vietnam.
Since clinching his party’s nomination for president, however, Obama has started to clarify, qualify and triangulate to such a degree that we can hardly recognize him from the inspirational “change” candidate he represented a few short months ago.
In the past couple of weeks, however, Obama has transitioned from moderating his positions to downright flip-flopping. Although Obama had previously vowed to filibuster any legislation that would grant immunity from prosecution to telecommunications companies who enabled the Bush administration to break the law and conduct domestic spying operations without a warrant, Obama has since changed his tune. He now supports a so-called “compromise” measure that effectively amounts to another congressional capitulation to the White House. As disconcerting and disappointing as Obama’s rhetorical gymnastics on warrantless wiretapping is, it isn’t the most troubling of his recent waffling.