Obama’s celebrated 2002 speech, in which he called Iraq a “dumb war” and warned that it would destabilize the Middle East and fan the flames of terrorism, was a key reason antiwar Democrats rallied to his side during the primary season. But in the Senate Obama avoided engaging on behalf of the Out of Iraq Caucus in Congress, and he deliberately avoided taking a leadership role. “Obama and his staff weren’t very responsive, and on Iraq and Iran they weren’t leaders,” says Paul Kawika Martin of Peace Action. “He didn’t introduce legislation, and they weren’t the ones on the floor pushing senators, pushing [majority leader Harry] Reid.” When antiwar members of the House reached out to the Senate, Obama demurred. “In that very critical period from January to mid-April 2007, when we were trying to reduce funding for the war, he was very hard to pin down,” says a veteran House staffer. ~Robert Dreyfuss

That must have been an example of his prudent pre-primary adjustment.  But, hey, he gave a speech once, and McCain is worse, so let’s just pretend we don’t know any of this.

Sullivan:

I don’t see anything more than prudent post-primary adjustment.

One of the most disturbing things about “mainstream” reaction to Obama’s reversals, particularly the reversal regarding the FISA legislation, is the idea that defending the Fourth Amendment against egregious, systematic violation by the government is some far-out extremist position that must be watered down or abandoned in order to appeal to “the middle.”  If I were in the political “middle,” I would be deeply offended by the idea that supporting the gutting of core civil liberties is required to win my vote.  If it is true that voters in “the middle” will reward assaulting constitutional protections for the illusion of security, some constitutional liberties won’t have much of a chance of surviving another administration like this one.  To be clear, this is not just a question of granting telecom immunity, undesirable as that is, but it is a question of resisting warrantless–and therefore illegal–wiretapping. 

Greenwald explains more fully why Obama’s justifications for his move are wrong and flatly contradict everything he has said on the matter before now:

In the past, Obama has opposed the type of warrantless eavesdropping which those PAA orders authorize. He’s repeatedly said that the FISA court works and there’s no need to authorize eavesdropping without individual warrants. None of that can be reconciled with his current claim that he supports this FISA “compromise” because National Security requires that those PAA orders not expire and that there be massive changes to FISA. It’s just as simple as that.        

It is important to note at this point that this is not an issue, as demagogues will try to make it, of defending the Fourth Amendment or allowing terrorist conspiracies to develop without the possibility of monitoring their communications.  It is a question of whether that surveillance will be subjected to judicial scrutiny through the FISA court and whether the government will have to justify its wiretapping in each case, or if the government will be permitted to engage in that surveillance of any and all international communications with essentially no oversight and no accountability.  Obama supports giving the government and this administration the unchecked power to spy on anyone they choose to spy on.  That’s pretty inspiring, isn’t it?   

As Yglesias notes, despite Obama’s reversals his overall platform is still much further to the left than recent Democratic nominees, and it seems to me that this is what the Obama campaign is banking on when the candidate engages in cynical reversals on fundamental questions of constitutional liberty.  They are counting on the rest of his agenda to bring along progressives who are appalled and disgusted by this most defensive of cowering crouches on national security, and they may be right.  As someone with no sympathy for Obama’s domestic agenda, I find the backtracking on civil liberties to be especially worrisome, since it seems to confirm that we will have the worst of the welfare and security states under a President Obama.  This just drives home for me how inexplicable small-government, constitutionalist conservative support for Obama is, since these supporters don’t have the excuse that they generally agree with the candidate’s domestic policies.  It also makes it clear why a strong showing by Barr is very important, since neither major candidate seems particularly interested in defending the Constitution.

P.S. I would add that the reflex of some Obama supporters to justify his reversal on the FISA legislation in terms of prudence and/or the political need to “move to the center” reinforces the unhealthy and dangerous pattern of identifying policies that subvert civil liberties and expand the power of government in the name of national security as “centrist.” This makes dissent from such terrible policies to be extremist by definition, which works to marginalise the genuinely more moderate, prudent and (in my view) properly conservative arguments against increasing the power of the security state.  If an able rhetorician could make the argument with conviction that constitutional liberties are fundamental and non-negotiable and that we have an obligation to preserve the legacy that has been handed down to us, he might be able to reframe the entire debate.  Or he could yield to the Washington consensus that says that civil liberties are the concern of the fringe and can be trampled on as and when necessary.

This is pretty good satire as far as it goes, but it gives the impression that the backlash against Obama on the left is irrational and evidence of an insistence on ideological or some other sort of purity over political pragmatism.  Besides making a joke out of the legitimate reasons for anger at Obama from his own supporters over the FISA legislation, it makes it seem as if principled protests from the left are somehow the cause of Democratic defeat, when the disastrous results of ’88 in particular were the result of a horribly-run campaign.  Think about it from their perspective: they see a tremendous opportunity in an overwhelmingly pro-Democratic year to win an election that also could provide something like a mandate for a progressive agenda, and in the interests of winning they have swallowed their objections to Obama’s relatively less progressive platform (as compared to Edwards or Clinton) only to be betrayed on an issue as fundamental and central as constitutional liberties and derided in the process as part of the problem with our political system.  “Be practical,” someone says, “we’re trying to win an election.”  To which they might reasonably reply, “To what end, if our candidate caves in on major issues?”  Many conservatives like to argue that when they give the Republican nominee grief about his pandering, changed positions or (as they see them) bad positions they are standing up for important principles.  When people on the left engage in the same behaviour, it’s supposed to be crazy, loserish fratricide.  It seems to me that there have to be some things that are not negotiable and things that should not be compromised for electoral expediency.  You might think constitutional protections would be among those things, and that this would not be the concern of left-liberals alone.  Apparently, you would be wrong.   

What has been remarkable about the slow, but eventually almost total embrace of Obama by the netroots is that most of them ultimately felt compelled to side with him in the primaries after Edwards dropped out.  His grassroots online movement arose largely outside of the netroots structures and became something of a competitor with them before gradually starting to subsume them.  Pretty early on the major community blogs became overwhelmingly pro-Obama, so much so that the few remaining Clintonite bloggers at Daily Kos broke away in protest.  For perhaps the first time there is sustained criticism of the nominee, and then only after the nominee did something that, as a matter of substance, is pretty terrible (and not just in the view of the left), but to listen to “mainstream” commentary everyone is supposed to treat this reaction as ludicrous.  That says as much about what is wrong with our political culture as the cynical reversal itself.        

P.S.  The backlash is growing.

In recent days, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on a social networking site on Mr. Obama’s own campaign Web site. They are calling on Mr. Obama to reverse his decision to endorse legislation supported by President Bush to expand the government’s domestic spying powers while also providing legal protection to the telecommunication companies that worked with the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks. ~The New York Times

Of course, if Obama did reverse himself for a second time on the same issue, he would appear to be even more supine and susceptible to political pressure than he already does.  It would be like his Jerusalem two-step (undivided, yet partitioned!)all over again, which could be used quite effectively to attack his judgement.  Of all the recent reversals and maneuverings, the flip on FISA legislation is the most outrageous, because the policy he has now endorsed is one of the worst of the Bush administration, and it is the one that erases one of the few differences between him and McCain on matters of national security.  What is probably equally troubling from the perspective of these Obama supporters is that it seems to confirm everything that his progressive critics said against Obama to be true: his talk of unity and the “post-partisan” persona were the pretexts for capitulation to their political opponents. 

In this narrow sense, Ed Kilgore makes sense when he wonders what all the fuss has been about:   

Third of all, it amazes me that anyone should be surprised by Barack Obama’s willingness on occasion to stray from Democratic Party orthodoxy or from strict down-the-line partisanship. It has been an important part of his political persona from day one. And those who accuse him of cynicism for expressing heretical thoughts on FISA or gun control or the death penalty now are perhaps the real cynics, who somehow thought he didn’t really mean all his early talk about transpartisan politics or overcoming the stale debates of past decades.

Some of us supposed that his talk of unity and bipartisan cooperation was sincere, which is why I thought it was terrible.  As I said more than once, most of the great policy debacles of recent years have been bipartisan achievements of collaboration of the two parties against the rest of the country.  Then again, that is what bipartisanship has always meant: yielding to the “centrist” consensus position, which tends to include a combination of the worst of both parties’ bad ideas.  Far from “overcoming” stale debates, as Greenwald has observed, Obama has been embracing narratives that portray his own supporters and people like them as the problem.   

As I have also been trying to stress for some time, the question is not whether Obama will stray from Democratic Party orthodoxy (he usually doesn’t, in fact), but whether he will ever take a position that would force him to confront powerful interests.  Having won the nomination, he has probably calculated that his progressive backers will not break with him now and will have nowhere to go (the fear of electing McCain is too powerful for most of them to permit protest voting), so he has positioned himself to avoid confronting either executive power or corporate interests more than he must.  He will not yield to his supporters’ demands on this, because I expect he does not see them as a threat to his political advancement, and he will be lauded by “mainstream” columnists for rebuffing the left and showing that he is “responsible” and, yes, “serious.”

P.S. Russ Feingold explains why the surveillance program itself is dangerous.

Update: Even Kos, not usually one to let important principles impede Democratic electoral success, gets it:

First, he reversed course and capitulated on FISA, not just turning back on the Constitution, but on the whole concept of “leadership”. Personally, I like to see presidents who 1) lead, and 2) uphold their promises to protect the Constitution.

It is interesting that some of those Obama supporters who screamed loudest that he must not “appease” the Clintons and thereby show weakness have been calm and unfazed, to put it mildly, by a real demonstration of weakness and surrender on an issue of fundamental constitutional protections.  This seems to make anti-Clintonism into a high principle that must not be compromised, while constitutional liberty is something that can be infringed and abused to give a candidate some sort of “credibility” on national security.  These are fairly odd priorities.

Via Jim Antle, I see that Professor Bacevich (a TAC Contributing Editor) has a very smart and interesting column in the Globe today.  Prof. Bacevich makes a very persuasive case that Mr. Bush will be leaving a substantial legacy that either one of his likely successors will inherit and which neither one of them has yet seriously challenged.  He says that Obama’s fitness for office hinges on challenging and promising to overturn a significant part of this legacy, and I would tend to agree.  Generally, what separates me from my pro-Obama colleagues is that they believe he intends to overturn at least some of this legacy, while I take him at his word that he is on board with almost all of it.  

Jim thinks that this new op-ed is a qualification of the support for Obama Bacevich outlined in his article for TAC, but this support was already heavily qualified at the time.  Unlike some of Obama’s more optimistic conservative admirers, Prof. Bacevich has never pretended that Obama was anything other than what he was when it came to foreign policy, which is to say a liberal interventionist who happened to oppose the war in Iraq.  It’s worth looking closely at the items on Bacevich’s list to see just how unlikely it is that Obama will turn against them:

• Defined the contemporary era as an “age of terror” with an open-ended “global war” as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;

Contrary to the misinterpretations of Obama’s recent remarks about prosecuting terror suspects in civilian courts, Obama does not propose redefining antiterrorism away from the “war on terror” model.  His support for the PATRIOT Act and the FISA legislation show that he is mostly, if not entirely, supportive of the expansions of government surveillance powers being used domestically.

• Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;

While Obama does not bang the drum for a military strike on Iran as often as his opponent does, his remarks to AIPAC confirm that he will not rule out an attack on Iran that would be framed as a “preventive” war.

• Affirmed – despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 – that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;

There is absolutely no indication that Obama believes otherwise, and has made increasing the Pentagon budget to aid in this power projection an important plank in his national security agenda. 

It is unclear how Obama would handle this, but it seems unlikely that any President committed to all of the above would want to be constrained by anything so quaint as Congressional oversight or public transparency.

• Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;

See the points re: PATRIOT Act and FISA above.

Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

I don’t remember Obama making any Paulian calls for the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security, and I can’t imagine him embarking on such a path.

• Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising “global leadership”;

As I said almost ten months ago, his vision takes America’s “global leadership” for granted and he frames his entire critique of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy in terms of restoring American leadership that he believes Bush has squandered. 

• Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.       

If there was any doubt about his commitment to this, Obama’s unflinching support of the bombing of Lebanon and his last two AIPAC speeches ought to have removed them forever.

Now a cynic might say that Obama has reversed himself so often in recent weeks that we need only wait a little while to find an Obama position that we like, but this would be to miss the pattern of Obama’s reversals.  In every case, he opts for the position that will bring him maximal political advantage and will allow him to avoid confrontation with powerful interests.  There are no areas of policy more resistant to reform than foreign policy and national security, and no areas of policy more politically dangerous to try to change dramatically (except perhaps entitlements), so we can take for granted that Obama’s embrace of the establishment consensus on foreign policy and national security will either not change or will become even more conventional over time.

Obama’s transformation from critic to champion of welfare reform is the latest in a series of moves to the center. ~Political Radar

Mickey Kaus will be pleased.  By “moves to the center,” of course, they are referring to expedient changes in position.  One is reminded of Obama’s old line against Clinton that she wanted to take credit for everything that worked in her husband’s administration and not take the blame for things that went wrong.  This was a clever and effective line, and it exposed Clinton’s claim of “experience” as the nonsense it was.  Now Obama would like to take credit for a ’90s welfare reform measure that he actually opposed at the time.  He presumably opposed it at the time because it was extremely unpopular in his district.  Instead of citing legislation that he actually supported and giving his reasons why he didn’t support welfare reform in the ’90s, he is exhibiting once again his aversion to confrontation and his habit of taking the path of least resistance.  With one or two things, a “pivot” to the center can be both necessary and smart.  To make so many changes in just the last two weeks (e.g., FISA, NAFTA, public financing, the D.C. gun ban and now this) reflects the sort of craven political calculation that is the antithesis of political leadership, while at the same time implying that Obama’s judgement must have been frequently flawed on many, many occasions, which is hardly reassuring when the candidate is principally running on his judgement. 

Update: C.J. Smith responds with some interesting points, but I think he is confusing Obama’s general policy record on some things (e.g., trade, guns) with his specific statements about NAFTA and the D.C. gun ban.  It’s true that Obama is generally a free trader, but one who will sometimes oppose free-trade agreements, such as CAFTA, when they are strongly opposed by his constituents, but it’s also true that he adopted a very strong anti-NAFTA line for the purposes of wooing labour support in the primaries and then once the nomination was his he could revert back to his support for the agreement.  NAFTA is the best example of a case where he simply demagogued an issue for votes while making clear to the interests that had a large stake in maintaining the status quo that he wasn’t seriously going to re-negotiate the agreement.  On the D.C. gun ban, his campaign said that he thought it was constitutional, which they have since tried to run away from by calling it an “inartful” statement.  I suppose it depends on what the meaning of “constitutional” is, right?  Once the decision came down, suddenly the ban was unconstitutional.  On public financing, you can understand why he did it, but that doesn’t change the fact that he unceremoniously threw out what he had pledged to do. 

Second Update: As I note below in the comments, this welfare item is the least of Obama’s “moves” that should raise doubts about his credibility as a reformer.  See Ambinder’s discussion of the relevant state legislation that Obama is touting in his second national ad, and see for yourself whether touting this bill really jibes with his opposition to the federal welfare reform legislation.  Maybe I am reading too much into this item, but given all the reversals of the last couple of weeks I think erring on the side of skepticism makes more sense.

Third Update: On a related note, Dominic Lawson discusses the reversals of recent weeks. 

Fourth Update: For whatever it’s worth (not a lot), Dick Morris has a column on the welfare item.

I think there are effective critiques of Obama’s understanding of patriotism, but Jonah Goldberg’s isn’t one of them.  Who is a patriot in his view?  He tells us:

We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is. 

According to Goldberg, Obama doesn’t believe this.  In support of this claim, he mostly refers to the ridiculous moments of excessive rhetoric in the campaign and the embarrassing worship of the man that many of his supporters practice, none of which really proves his case.  Is Obama too full of himself, and is his campaign a cavalcade of delusional personality cultists?  Yes.  Does that make them insufficiently patriotic?  That’s not obvious.  It is unfortunate for Goldberg that his column came out the day after Obama gave his patriotism speech, since the speech completely devastates Goldberg’s thesis.  Among other things, Obama said:

I believe those who attack America’s flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.

And again:

As we begin our fourth century as a nation, it is easy to take the extraordinary nature of America for granted.

And again:

As I got older, that gut instinct – that America is the greatest country on earth – would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections….Not only because, in my mind, the joys of American life and culture, its vitality, its variety and its freedom, always outweighed its imperfections, but because I learned that what makes America great has never been its perfection but the belief that it can be made better. 

So, in other words, Obama does believe that America is fundamentally good and great, but can be made better.  I find both the exceptionalist and the meliorist aspects of this view to be misguided and troubling, but if the standard that Goldberg wants to set is a belief in the “fundamental goodness” of America he cannot very well claim that Obama does not meet that standard.

Now Obama is also a Christianist, rendering that dubious term to be even more meaningless (if that’s possible).  For my part, I look forward to seeing an extensive essay warning of the dangers of incipient Social Gospel theocracy in the event of an Obama Presidency and the argument that the Democrats have become an essentially religious party dominated by liberation theologians.  I think I may end up being disappointed. 

The difference in tone and attitude towards left-liberal “Christianism” compared to Sullivan’s dire warnings of fundamentalist takeover is remarkable, but not surprising.  It is consistent with the sort of criticism of religious conservatism that Sullivan has been making for years, which is centered around rejection of any politics that would put religious imperatives into action in public life.  That rejection does not include political action inspired by religious imperatives that are broadly in line with a socially liberal and activist politics.  The rule seems to be something like this: the less orthodox or traditional the religion or church, the more acceptable its “interference” in political life.    

The electoral angle is interesting, but I would consider the source of that figure of Obama being able to get 40% of the evangelical vote.  As veteran Romney foes remember, Mark DeMoss was one of Romney’s evangelical “outreach” advisors and was not especially successful in that role, so I might not rely on him for insights into how evangelicals will vote or how they are thinking about this election.  For Obama to receive 40% of the evangelical vote, he would need to improve on his current standing by more than 90% or eighteen points up from the abysmal 22% support he currently has.  For all of the talk about the enthusiasm gap, Obama’s religious rhetoric, McCain’s problems with religious conservatives, evangelical disillusionment with the GOP, and the rising generation of evangelicals interested in a broader political agenda, which are all real, almost 70% of white evangelicals say they will back McCain in the fall. 

That is a significant decline from Bush’s peak of support among these voters at 78%, but as the Post explains Bush was only polling at 65% at this time four years ago.  Think about that: the average evangelical voter is more likely at this point in the cycle to be supporting McCain than he was likely to be supporting Bush four years earlier.  Such stability in levels of support for the Republican nominee should put to rest speculation about Obama’s potential to steal evangelical votes away from the GOP.  Obama is actually polling lower than Kerry was (and Kerry’s numbers declined over the course of the campaign).  What Obama’s numbers show is that there has been zero movement of evangelicals towards him relative to Kerry’s share of the vote in ’04.  McCain may not excite them, but except for the minority that will stay home or cast third party votes (Chuck Baldwin is the logical alternative for many of these voters) they have not given up on the GOP when it comes to presidential voting. 

In theory, that could change, but even if every voter that McCain is losing goes to Obama (not likely) that would still get him to just under one-third of the demographic.  Increasing Democratic vote share among evangelicals at the presidential level is the perpetual will o’ the wisp for the left that increasing black support for the GOP is on the right.  There are so many structural and policy reasons for these patterns that no single politician talking about the Joshua Generation and exhibiting some fluency with Scripture will change things very much.

During the First World War, France fought on against the German invaders for four long years, despite having more of its soldiers killed than all the American soldiers killed in all the wars in the history of the United States, put together.

But during the Second World War, France collapsed after just six weeks of fighting and surrendered to Nazi Germany. ~Thomas Sowell

One of the more depressing features of the Bush Era has been the declination of Thomas Sowell from a serious public intellectual to whatever he has now become.  Reciting the tale of post-WWI French demoralisation sixty years after the fact and blissful ignorance of the 100,000 dead and 200,000 wounded Frenchmen in 1940 alone, who outnumber American casualty figures for most of our wars, are what remains for someone who once made interesting and worthwhile observations about the world.