Obama's Changing Message of Change

Today the New York Times editorializes about the "New and Not Improved" Barack Obama.

It's disheartening to see "The Audacity of Hope" beginning to morph into "The Mendacity of Change" and disappointing that Obama may be taking for granted those whose hopes he stirred and reaching out too far and too fast to those who will only see his efforts to build consensus as duplicity and weakness.

A month ago, it would have been unthinkable to write that sentence, but since wrapping up the nomination, the apostle of the New Politics has been looking like a Mr. Hyde of the old on almost an issue a day--public campaign financing, telecom immunity in the FISA bill, gun control, the death penalty for crimes not involving murder and the separation of church and state.

"We are not shocked," the Times says, "when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games."

Political purity is not the issue in all this. Many Obama admirers value, among other qualities, his open-mindedness and his not-Bush aversion to dogmaticism. But these recent rapid shifts of substance and tone raise suspicions of calculation and opportunism--of a too-clever-by-half attempt to retool his image for demographic purposes.

If so, he and his campaign advisers risk losing much of what got him to where he is now--an authenticity that this year's voters desperately want.

The campaign may want to stop worrying so much about converting Independents and liberal Republicans and concentrate on winning over and solidify his support among those Democrats who backed Hillary Clinton. They are a more natural constituency for him, if he can win and keep their trust.

In a dialogue with dissenting voters on his web site about his FISA position, Obama made a point worth keeping in mind for the long run:

"I learned long ago, when working as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago, that when citizens join their voices together, they can hold their leaders accountable. I’m not exempt from that. I’m certainly not perfect, and expect to be held accountable too."

Bloomberg's Kibitzer Candidacy

After teasing us for a year, Mike Bloomberg is putting his billion dollars back in his wallet and leaving a few platitudes on the plate instead.

In a New York Times OpEd titled "I'm Not Running for President, but...," New York's Mayor delivers a ringing concession speech for a presidential campaign that never started.

As he leaves the arena he didn't enter, Bloomberg chides the future nominees for being "afraid to level" with voters about global trade, global warming, immigration, improving schools and gun control.

"More of the same won’t do, on the economy or any other issue," he says. "We need innovative ideas, bold action and courageous leadership. That’s not just empty rhetoric, and the idea that we have the ability to solve our toughest problems isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream."

But he stands ready, Bloomberg tells us, to help McCain and Obama or Clinton, "to push them forward, by using the means at my disposal to promote a real and honest debate."

In the event the Mayor has forgotten his ethnic roots, what he is proposing to be is a kibitzer, defined as "someone who looks on and offers unwanted, usually meddlesome advice to others."

But not entirely, Bloomberg warns us: "If a candidate takes an independent, nonpartisan approach--and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy--I’ll join others in helping that candidate win the White House."

Does he mean Ralph Nader?

The Politics of Murder

Déjà vu won't do. Recurring nightmare is a better description for what happened today on a college campus in DeKalb, Illinois--an armed-to-the-teeth gunman, random shooting, sudden deaths.

This time there were five victims, plus the shooter, who stepped from behind a curtain in a lecture hall and started firing indiscriminately before killing himself on the stage. He had a shotgun, a Glock pistol and another handgun.

Ten months after Virginia Tech, the body count is mercifully lower, but the aftermath will be the same.

A special agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is at the scene, promising to "be urgently tracing the firearms and learning the history of the weapons" to "learn where they came from and how the shooter came to possess them."

Last April, John McCain responded to the Virginia massacre by saying, "We have to look at what happened here, but it doesn't change my views on the Second Amendment, except to make sure that these kinds of weapons don't fall into the hands of bad people...Obviously we have to keep guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens."

Now, as the Republican nominee-to-be courts the favor of his from-my-cold-dead-hands constituency, will his response be any different? The rest of us will have to mourn without him.

The McCain Mutiny

Now that he is the Republican front runner again (talk about Comeback Kids!), John McCain has a bull's eye on his back for all manner of Conservatives, and today's Washington Post recites the litany.

"For at least eight years," the Post reports, "official Republican Washington has been dominated by what McCain advocates have called President Bush's 'Death Star'--an array of advocacy groups and lobbyists that backed Bush in 2000 and have remained the city's conservative power brokers.

"Republican politicians with national ambitions genuflect to (David) Keene at his Conservative Political Action Conference. They sign (Grover) Norquist's pledge not to raise taxes and attend the weekly conservative conclaves over which he presides as the head of Americans for Tax Reform. And they curry favor with religious conservatives such as Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition."

At one time or another, McCain has poked a finger in the eye of these king makers with his position on issues, as the executive director of Gun Owners of America points out. "I can tell you every single immigration activist and organization is terrified by the New Hampshire results," says the executive director of an "immigration reduction" group.

If Huckabee and Thompson fail to keep McCain from taking South Carolina, all these idealists will be put to a severe reality test. At the moment, Sen. Jim DeMint is backing Romney there, but John McCain's Baghdad traveling companion and likely running mate, Lindsey Graham, will be trying to tip the scales in his favor.

In 2000, Karl Rove bushwhacked McCain there, but that kind of ambush is not in the cards this time.

Larry Craig Is Sticking to His Guns

Washington's Walking Embarrassment is still sitting proudly in his Senate seat and, along with his Idaho colleague, Michael Crapo (sic), is blocking President Bush’s nomination of Michael Sullivan to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

According to the Editorial Board blog of the New York Times, "Mr. Crapo’s spokesman said his boss is hearing from gun owners and dealers with 'concerns about ATF policies regarding gun sales and even ownership.' It may be, he said, 'that the federal government is getting a little too aggressive with people who haven’t done anything wrong.'

"It’s a remarkable claim to make in a month in which a young gunman in Nebraska shot 11 people, killing eight of them, at an Omaha shopping mall, and another killed four young people in two attacks on religious organizations in Colorado, before taking his own life.

"The Colorado gunman, according to the Denver Post, spent a year buying guns and ammunition...and all of his purchases were within the law. When a large shipment of ammunition was sent to a post office box owned by the gunman, the authorities were alerted, the paper reports--and specifically determined that he had a legal right to receive it."

Awaiting action by the Senate Ethics Committee on his little Minneapolis men's room misunderstanding, Sen. Craig is sticking to his guns maintaining the record that earned him an A+ from the National Rifle Association. The voters who saw him inducted into Idaho's Hall of Fame this fall must be proud.

The McCain Mutiny

With mass departures today from his campaign staff, it may be time to write John McCain’s political obituary. The captain of the Straight Talk Express deserves to go out on his shield like the honorable warrior he has always been.

In an eerie parallel to Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny,” the Senator from Arizona morphed from a lifelong by-the-book career serviceman to the unhinged Capt. Queeg of the popular 1950’s novel, play and movie.

In the anger over his support for an insane war, it would be an injustice if McCain’s service to his country were swept out with the Iraq wreckage. Unlike Bush, Cheney and, yes, Bill Clinton, he served and suffered through Vietnam, another unjust war not of his making.

Born in the Panama Canal Zone where his father, an Admiral, was stationed, John Sidney McCain III went to Annapolis, was wounded in Vietnam, and captured and tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner, most of it in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

As a Senator, he has advocated gun control, campaign finance reform and a humane approach to immigration legislation.

McCain might have been a quirky President, but unlike Bush, an honorable one if he hadn’t been derailed by the Rove smear machine in 2000 and his own mistakes for 2008.

But the Republican field of candidates he leaves behind provides the best possible contrast to his integrity.

Ave et vale, Senator.

Bloomberg the Iffy Independent

As the New York Mayor’s departure from the Republican Party stirs political excitement, it may help to remember his role in giving us another Independent on the national scene last year--Joe Lieberman.

After the voters of Connecticut repudiated Lieberman in their party primary for his cheer-leading the war in Iraq and the Republicans nominated a non-entity who would draw only 10 percent of their vote, it was Bloomberg who supplied the crucial money and manpower to elect him as an “Independent” who is now holding his former party hostage over control of the Senate and cheer-leading for a war in Iran.

If Bloomberg’s philosophy as a technocrat extends to this kind of impartiality about the most passionate issue of our time, what price Independence? His leadership on gun control is impressive, but then again his embrace of Gov. Arnold on the other coast is not reassuring.

Bloomberg is too intelligent to remain a Republican, but does he have the heart and commitment for anything more?