Larry Hunter takes Obamacon enthusiasm to its logical extreme and simply pretends* that Obama’s domestic policy isn’t the domestic agenda he will pursue:

Plus, when it comes to domestic issues, I don’t take Obama at his word. That may sound cynical. But the fact that he says just about all the wrong things on domestic issues doesn’t bother me as much as it once would have. After all, the Republicans said all the right things – fiscal responsibility, spending restraint – and it didn’t mean a thing. It is a sad commentary on American politics today, but it’s taken as a given that politicians, all of them, must pander, obfuscate and prevaricate.

This is roughly as persuasive as Philip Klein’s attempts to discount everything Obama says about foreign policy and national security and assume that he is, in fact, a secret McGovernite/appeaser who wishes Israel harm.  What I find remarkable is that Hunter will take Obama at his word on the war and then conveniently overlook everything else in Obama’s record and his foreign and security policies that suggests that Obama’s credibility as an antiwar politician is quite poor.  In general, Obama proposes an activist, hawkish foreign policy and accepts the use of essentially all the surveillance powers that Mr. Bush received or usurped, and his position on Israel policy is indistinguishable from that of the current administration.  None of this satisfies Klein, just as apparently none of it worries Hunter. 

The worrisome thing about Obama is that it seems you generally can take him at his word when he stakes out a policy position, and most of what he has said he will do is quite awful, especially when judged from an antiwar, constitutionalist conservative perspective.  On the whole, when he has reversed himself substantively it has been in the opposite direction away from those few things that antiwar conservatives have found appealing.  In the last six weeks, he has adopted a more confrontational attitude towards Iran than he had displayed before (and he does this at a time when the Bush administration has started becoming more interested in negotiation!), caved on Fourth Amendment protections and has at the very least “shifted emphasis” on Iraq.  With the opening of intermediate-level negotiations with the Iranians, one of Obama’s signature issues has been co-opted by the sitting administration after he had started to adopt a more belligerent tone regarding the Kyl-Lieberman amendment.  Certainly, this formal opening to Iran is interesting and probably good news, but it also deprives Obama of one of the few aspects of foreign policy in which he remains reasonably distinct from Mr. Bush.   

Of course, you can still argue that Obama is marginally preferable to the even more hawkish, pro-security state candidate in McCain and you can insist that third-party voting is useless, but as the two candidates “converge” it is Obama who is gradually losing whatever attractive features he may have once had in the eyes of antiwar conservatives.  There are tactical “moves to the center,” and then there are capitulations to establishment positions.  The only reason to expect that Obama will abandon his central domestic agenda proposals once in office is if the political pressure to push them through Congress is substantially weaker than the pressure resisting them.  That seems obvious, and perhaps it is, but it goes to the heart of why Obamacon arguments such as Hunter’s make no sense: the preference for avoiding confrontation and political risk that makes Obama potentially less of a concern on domestic policy is the same preference that will ensure that everything Hunter likes about Obama is also going to vanish or diminish after the election.  Put another way, Hunter is basically hoping that Obama proves to be such a weak President that he cannot advance his domestic policy agenda, but that he is also such a tremendously dynamic and effective President that he will be able to restore compromised civil liberties, end the war in Iraq and resist entanglement in a new war with Iran.  That is a pretty rare combination.

P.S.  Actually, Hunter hopes that Obama will be like JFK, but if we took this comparison on its face this would mean that Hunter hopes Obama will be inclined to cut taxes but will botch every major foreign policy decision he ever makes, which would be the exact opposite of Hunter’s stated reasons for supporting him.

* I should clarify: Mr. Hunter doesn’t really pretend this, but simply doesn’t care one way or the other, as he says towards the end:

But here’s the thing: Even if my hopes on domestic policy are dashed and Obama reveals himself as an unreconstructed, dyed-in-the-wool, big-government liberal, I’m still voting for him.

Reveals himself?  He hasn’t been hiding his agenda.  What does Mr. Hunter think Obama has been proposing to do for the last year and a half if not drastically expand the government’s size and role?  What happens when his hopes on civil liberties and foreign policy are also dashed?  This seems relevant, since it is already happening.