By ANDREW SULLIVAN
Last updated: 8:52 am
July 6, 2008
Posted: 2:00 am
July 6, 2008
It is a telling sign of where American politics is now headed that last week several leading conservative voices proclaimed Barack Obama had seen the conservative light and many leading liberal voices accused him of being a sellout.
On one extreme, The Wall Street Journal bizarrely claimed that Obama was now running for George W Bush's third term. On the other, liberal blogger Arianna Huffington accused him of making a "very serious mistake" by agreeing to a new wire-tapping law. And leading left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas accused Obama of "unnecessary stabbing" of political allies. Neither side, I'd say, is right - the truth is more muddy. However, if you want proof that Obama is one of the shrewdest politicians in recent history, last week is hard to refute.
Obama began it with a full-throated defense of patriotism, in front of two large American flags, invoking his white family and its history of military service. He went out of his way to praise General David Petraeus and to condemn the attack by the anti-war group Moveon.org on him as "General Betray Us."
Obama went on the next day to brazenly co-opt one of Bush's signature policy innovations, funneling public money to the social services of religious organizations. He ended the week by dropping his previous long-held position on a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq in favor of a "refined" strategy of withdrawal as soon as prudently possible after consultations with generals on the ground.
All of this caps a flurry of small adjustments in the post-primary phase. We now know that Obama can live with mass wire-tapping to gain anti-terror intelligence, as long as it is placed under congressional law and oversight in ways Bush tried to avoid. He was fine about the Supreme Court's defence of gun rights in the recently decided Heller case (in which a Washington DC security guard argued for his right to carry a gun to protect himself); he supported the death penalty in some extreme cases such as child rape; he ran an ad touting his own role (much exaggerated) on welfare reform; and he also plans to avoid any tax hikes on the middle class while adding some strong fiscal medicine to the well-to-do.
