Charles Krauthammer wrote a good piece yesterday about the way our MSM has handled Obama with kid gloves, and most likely will continue to do so:
Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech — designed to rationalize why “I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother” — then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great “race speech” now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.
Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.
Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama’s about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain’s 527 independent expenditure groups — notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico’s Jonathan Martin notes, “there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group” and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.
I may have to disagree a bit with Charles here seeing that more then a few newspapers were a bit upset at Obama for his waffling on FISA such as the WaPo:
Pardon the sarcasm. But given Mr. Obama’s earlier pledge to “aggressively pursue” an agreement with the Republican nominee to accept public financing, his effort to cloak his broken promise in the smug mantle of selfless dedication to the public good is a little hard to take.
The New York Times:
The excitement underpinning Senator Barack Obama’s campaign rests considerably on his evocative vows to depart from self-interested politics. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama has come up short of that standard with his decision to reject public spending limitations and opt instead for unlimited private financing in the general election.
the first-term Illinois senator tarnished his carefully honed image as a different kind of politician — one who means what he says and says what he means — while undercutting his call for “a new kind of politics.”
And many on the left derided Obama for his typical politician behavior. But I get what Charles is alluding to here. While they may have raked him over the coals a bit, it won’t last. They will be back to calling him the next coming of Abraham Lincoln in no time.
But there is no disputing the luster has faded. This movement of a “different kind of politician” has come and gone with Obama’s flip-flopping. McClatchy, of all news organizations, can even see this:
From the beginning, Barack Obama’s special appeal was his vow to remain an idealistic outsider, courageous and optimistic, and never to shift his positions for political expediency, or become captive of the Inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia, or kiss up to special interests and big money donors.
In recent weeks, though, Obama has done all those things.
He abandoned public campaign financing after years of championing it. Backed a compromise on wiretap legislation that gives telecom companies retroactive immunity for helping the government conduct spying without warrants. Dumped his controversial pastor of two decades — then his church — after saying he could no more abandon the pastor than abandon his own grandmother.
I think Ed Morrissey put it best:
He has to get the centrists, independents, and conservative Democrats on board, and right now John McCain is making inroads in these groups instead. Obama has shifted his positions explicitly to convince these voters to support him, but he has made himself into the antithesis of what his campaign supposedly represents: the same, old, dishonest politics. Instead of representing Hope and Change, he has broken trust with voters on issue after issue in a naked grab for power.
Its faded, but the true believers will never leave the flock and the MSM, while a bit pissed at the moment, will come back into the fold in no time.
Hell, a few days after the FISA vote most of the MSM just shrugged their shoulders on Obama’s flip-flopping on gun control. Howard Kurtz’s article in the WaPo pointes to various MSM outfits that pretty much ignored Obama’s earlier statements:
And here’s what ABC reported yesterday: ” ‘That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator’s consistent position,’ Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News.”
Inartful indeed.
But even though the earlier Obama quote and the “inartful” comment have been bouncing around the Net for 24 hours, I’m not seeing any reference to them in the morning papers. Most do what the New York Times did: “Mr. Obama, who like Mr. McCain has been on record as supporting the individual-rights view, said the ruling would ‘provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.’ ”
Supporting the individual-rights view? Not in November.
Even the Tribune–the very paper that the Obama camp told he supported the gun ban–makes no reference to the November interview. Instead: “Democrat Barack Obama offered a guarded response Thursday to the Supreme Court ruling striking down the District of Columbia’s prohibition on handguns and sidestepped providing a view on the 32-year-old local gun ban. Republican rival John McCain’s campaign accused him of an ‘incredible flip-flop’ on gun control.”
So McCain accuses Obama of a flip-flop, and the Trib can’t check the clips to tell readers whether there’s some basis in fact for the charge?
USA Today takes the same tack:
“In a conference call put together by McCain’s campaign, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said . . . that Obama has been changing his position on the gun issue and said the Democratic senator has done some ‘incredible flip-flopping’ on key issue.”
And? And? That’s all we get? He said/he said journalism?
I can’t leave out the part where Kurtz linked to Flopping Aces alongside Hot Air and Redstate:
The conservative blogosphere, however, brings out the heavy guns. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey points out that Obama is, after all, a lawyer:
“Barack Obama has been spinning like a top, and watching his positions on, well, just about everything is like watching table-tennis matches on TiVo triple fast forward. FISA, public financing, and NAFTA have all been reversed in the last couple of weeks, and Obama’s not through yet . . .
“Suddenly, with the general election looming, Obama discovers that his campaign’s statement was inartful. This seems rather puzzling, because before he ran for public office, Barack Obama was supposed to be a Constitutional law expert. One might expect the ‘inartful’ excuse on wetlands reclamation or some other esoteric matter of public policy, but the Constitution is what he supposedly studied at Columbia and Harvard.”
Red State: “May I suggest that Senator Obama start putting a ‘Freshest if used by’ date on all his speeches? It’d be a help, really.”
Flopping Aces says the timing is a bit coincidental:
“Every flippin day we get more evidence that Obama is the worst flip-flopper to have come along in sometime . . .
“Puhlease. ‘Inartful?’ Either you believe the ban was constitutional or not. Simple question. His spokesperson said he did believe it was constitutional and he never corrected this statement until the day of the decision.”
Kinda cool being put into the same category as those guys, thanks Howard!
But back to the subject at hand. The fact of the matter is that while the MSM was pissed for a bit, within hours of the SCOTUS decision they were already back to spinning and ignoring the messiahs earlier statements that clearly show he flipped and flopped.
So, in the end, Charles is dead on right. The MSM is all in for Obama….not surprising, but disappointing.
See author page