Bascially, he [Obama] made a complete hash of things this evening heading into the holiday weekend. ~Tom Bevan

To be fair, the charge of inconsistency on Iraq can be exaggerated.  That said, it seems to me that the charge that Obama committed a first-class political blunder going into a long weekend is basically right.  Having already given substance to the idea that he will abandon important pledges made during the primaries with his flips on the FISA legislation and public financing, and having apparently reversed himself on at least a couple other questions in the space of a few weeks, it was an unusually poor time to be “inartful,” as they like to call it, about one of the central policy questions of the day.  Even if Obama’s remarks were completely consistent with past statements, which I think is not the case, he had nonetheless set himself up over the last few weeks to be attacked for yet another shift on a major policy.  If the McCain campaign has a problem coming up with a coherent message, Obama’s campaign has its own problems with message discipline.  Having just shaken the confidence of many of his supporters over the FISA bill and having opened himself up to being portrayed as opportunistic on something as fundamental as constitutional protections, this was hardly the time to start talking about “refining” anything.  The Obama campaign wants the candidate to display thoughtfulness, but they don’t seem to think very much about how the candidate’s phrases will be interpreted by supporters and critics alike. 

While I think the latest remarks did indicate some change in position, it is worth remembering that Samantha Power had already said that the 16-month timetable was a “best-case scenario.”  That had occurred back around the same time as the Goolsbee/NAFTA business, which overshadowed it, and since Power was no longer formally associated with the campaign the remarks did not create that many waves.  In the heat of the Clinton v. Obama contest, journalists were inclined not to dwell on this acknowledgement that the timetable was ultimately meaningless.  If the timetable is meaningless, and withdrawal is contingent on the stability of Iraq, the withdrawal can and will be deferred for many years.  There is a reason why war supporters are happy with Obama’s recent remarks, and it is not purely a matter of partisan spin, just as there was a reason why neoconservatives were very excited by his Council of Global Affairs speech last year and his AIPAC audience was very excited by his remarks about Jerusalem.  They can detect concessions to their position, even if his starry-eyed supporters cannot.  So I suppose you can count me as one of those who never thought much of Obama’s position on Iraq, so for me these latest remarks just confirm that his earlier position was as unattractive as I thought it was.  

This question of timetables touches on an important point: candidates who want you to think they will end a deployment talk about timetables to prevent just this sort of “pragmatic” kicking of the can down the road based on changing conditions.  Withdrawing combat forces from a war zone will always involve risk and there will be consequences, both foreseeable and unforeseeable, to such an action, but the point of following a timetable for withdrawal is to ensure that there will be a certain date after which the withdrawal will be complete.  This keeps an administration accountable to its pledges, yes, but it has a more practical value as well.  The potential dangers to the soliders from a withdrawal make it all the more important to make the withdrawal as fast as possible.  Withdrawal that can be interrupted or halted because of changing conditions in the country is the worst of both worlds: having signalled the readiness to leave, you then stop leaving and put yourself in a position where you may even have to recall some of the forces you have already withdrawn.  The desire to appear empirical and “pragmatic” is so great in the Obama campaign, as part of its ongoing bad habit of adopting certain positions simply to demonstrate how un-Bush-like the candidate is, that it is pushing them to adopt what is substantively probably the worst of three options.  Those three are expeditious withdrawal, indefinitely maintaining a large military presence in Iraq and the half-a-loaf withdrawal-only-so-long-as-there-is-stability position that Obama has staked out.  This is why any administration that tries to to both end the war in Iraq and premise withdrawal on stability in Iraq is not likely going to be able to end the war, because it has put Iraqi stability ahead of the American interest and defined acceptable conditions for withdrawal in such a way that withdrawal will never be possible.   

People who make an idol out of “pragmatism,” as many Obama supporters now feel compelled to do, are making a similar kind of blunder as those who make an idol out of “resolve” or “bipartisanship” or “toughness.”  In themselves, these things may or may not be desirable in a given situation.  It is the context and the end to which pragmatism is being put that determine whether or not it is desirable to be pragmatic.  In fact, there are times when it pays to be resolute, just as there are times when it pays to be flexible, but typically pragmatists are frequently in danger of always opting for flexibility and “refinining” things in perpetuity.

The problem, of course, is that the essentially open-ended nature of the three “S”s (Safety, Security, Stability) entails that there will always be a perceived need to keep significant numbers of troops on the ground, and so that any policy “dictated” by anything other than a principled commitment to pack up and go as fast as possible – which is to say, very fast – is a recipe for nothing less than an indefinite occupation. Things are getting better? Better keep the troops there, so we can keep up the progress. Getting worse? Can’t pull them out now, or it might all go to shit. Reached a plateau? Good – let’s keep troop levels just where they are, lest we should awake a sleeping giant. Until Iraq looks like Albuquerque – and trust me folks, it ain’t gonna happen – pretty much all of the “refining” Obama and the commanders do is going to involve further rationalizations for keeping our boys and girls in the desert. ~John Schwenkler

John has more here.  This has always been the problem with a strategy, so called, that makes success dependent on the political stability and internal security of Iraq, since a significant part of the argument for withdrawal is that both of these things are going to be lacking for a very long time and also probably cannot be achieved while Iraqis have a large foreign military presence on their soil.  To make our withdrawal contingent on an independent, functioning Iraqi military and police force, which is effectively what stability and security in Iraq will reasonably require, is to admit that we are staying there for years and probably more than a decade, because pretty much no one believes that either force can operate successfully on its own now or in the next several years.  To make a timetable for withdrawal contingent on such developments is to give up on withdrawing most, much less all, combat troops in the next four years.  Contrary to the claims of Krauthammer, without any greater likelihood that the war will be over by 2013 under Obama than under McCain (who has also said, incredibly, that the war will be over in 2013) there is hardly any reason based in foreign policy to choose him.  In theory, if the election does not turn on Iraq, but turns instead on domestic issues conventional wisdom takes it for granted that Obama has the advantage, but it seems to me that Obama will not be able to justify the budgeting for any part of his domestic agenda so long as the war in Iraq continues.  If Obama cannot be relied on to end the war fairly quickly, his entire agenda becomes politically unworkable.  In light of his flip on the FISA legislation, why anyone would now believe that Obama would follow through on the much more dangerous and politically explosive course of withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, when many voices in the Washington establishment are clearly telling him not to do this, is honestly beyond me.     

Frankly, the new statement is a significant shift from the statements Obama made at the debate back in September when he said he couldn’t promise to have combat troops out by 2013.  Leaving residual forces and leaving the door open to a new intervention in the event of genocide were already fairly watered down positions on withdrawal, but at least the timetable (which most people, apparently except for Obama, understood was supposed to be fixed) was supposed to deliver on the promise of an expeditious withdrawal of combat troops.  It’s true that Obama left open the possibility of delay depending on contingencies, but until this week he had not defined them in terms that are essentially indistinguishable from those of the administration, right down to consulting with the “commanders on the ground.”  (Update: Apparently, he has used this phrase repeatedly in the past.  It is still the case that this basically contradicts meaningful support for withdrawal.) 

Mr. Bush used this phrase so often as a code for endless occupation that it has become laughable.  That Mr. Bush does not adjust well to changing circumstances is well known, but what Mr. Bush did with this mantra about “commanders on the ground” was to mask failed strategy behind a pose of prudence and empiricism.  He also replaced the President’s strategic judgement with reports about the tactical situtation, or rather allowed whatever he heard or said he heard from the “commanders on the ground” to serve as the excuse for why there was no coherent or feasible strategy.  If you have listened to Mr. Bush over the years (“as they stand up, we will stand down”), you will find someone who says that American forces will be in Iraq only as long as they are needed to provide for security and maintaining stability.  Obviously, in light of the permanent basing agreement Washington has been foisting on the Iraqis, this has always been misleading, but it’s not clear to me why Obama should not receive criticism for essentially echoing this position. 

When Gen. Petraeus could not, or did not, answer the obvious question from Sen. Warner about whether the war in Iraq is making America safer, he could be forgiven for not having an answer–how can he assess whether U.S. strategy in Iraq is advancing national security when the President has consistently defined success in Iraq entirely in terms of conditions in Iraq?  The refusal to think of the war in terms of the American interest, which has so confused the administration’s every move in Iraq, also afflicts Obama.  The questions ought to be the following.  Will remaining in Iraq beyond the 16-month timeline advance the national interest?  If so, what are the gains we can expect?  Are the expected gains worth the continued strain on our military?  It seems to me the answers are: no, none and no.  The proper pro-withdrawal argument has always been that remaining in Iraq any longer will be an unnecessary and unjustifiable drain on our resources and an abuse of our military, and that it serves no American interest.  Unless Obama can persuasively argue otherwise, tying our withdrawal to conditions in Iraq is all but identical to the administration’s line. 

P.S.  Obviously, the idea of delaying withdrawal on account of the safety of the soldiers, as Obama does in his latest statement, is rather bizarre.  If their safety is one of the main issues, withdrawing them from a war zone as quickly as possible would make the most sense.  In practice, however, their safety takes second place to pursuing the chimerical goal of Iraqi stability, as it always has.

Update: Crowley’s article on Obama’s Iraq policy makes another important point that should not be forgotten:

A recent Rasmussen poll found that 65 percent of Americans want to see the United States out of Iraq within a year. At least that many people would likely expect Obama to follow through on his 16-month pledge. Failure to do so could be a political disaster.

Meanwhile, my pessimistic skepticism of Obama’s antiwar position seems to be more justified all the time.

Second Update: Josh Marshall writes:

Reporters who can’t grasp what Obama is saying seem simply to have been permanently befuddled by George W. Bush’s game-playing over delegating policy to commanders.

But thatis effectively what Obama is also doing.  If the “commanders on the ground” say that American forces cannot be withdrawn safely and without undermining Iraqi stability, and Obama has made withdrawal contingent on these things, Obama will allow his policy to be “constrained” by what the “commanders on the ground” tell him.  It is almost exactly the same deference to military officers that Mr. Bush has practiced.  As Crowley notes:

Obama has also said repeatedly that he would consult with “commanders on the ground” to set his strategy. Right now, that doesn’t seem entirely consistent with his withdrawal plan. “If, indeed, a President Obama were to listen to his ground commanders, right now as the situation stands, without dramatic change, they would not be recommending withdrawal,” the veteran Time Iraq correspondent Michael Ware explained on CNN last month, echoing a common view. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen told reporters last month that a precipitous withdrawal “would concern me greatly.” (Mullen’s two-year term doesn’t expire until August 2009.)    

Senator Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot sustain a long-term military presence in Iraq, but added that he would be open to “refine my policies” about a timeline for withdrawing troops after meeting with American military commanders during a trip to Iraq later this month. ~The Caucus

The undesirable influence of Lippert seems to be growing ever greater.  Meanwhile, the commanders “on the ground” (as opposed to where?) have made their predictable reappearance in Obama’s remarks:

And when I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I’m sure I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.

At this rate, they will be refined right out of existence. 

Tom Bevan correctly notes:

This is may not [be] a flip-flop by the technical definition of the term, but it certainly is a substantial walk back on perhaps the defining issue of the election that will draw fire from both the right and the left.

Obama does a lot of backward walking these days, and so it’s not surprising that he keeps tripping all over his own promises.  Of course, there are two ways to look at this latest news: either Obama’s original antiwar stance was never very strong and any “refinements” he makes now are just small modifications to an originally weak position, or he has started yielding to the conventional wisdom that his position on Iraq has to change because of the “success” of the “surge” (whose success, as I have said before, might better described as failure).  This either confirms that he was never much of an antiwar leader, or it means that he will align himself more and more with the Washington consensus the closer he comes to being elected.    

Actually, there are three ways to look at this: there are these two interpretations, and the one that most Obama supporters will probably choose.  According to the third view, this is proof that Obama is a pragmatist and open to evidence rather than someone who runs away from fights, avoids risk and eschews leadership.  Then again, it is these latter qualities that usually give pragmatists such a bad name.     

P.S.  On Obama’s own campaign site, this is how they describe the relevant part of his position:

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq.  He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.

Though it was never a full withdrawal position, at least it was something.  It would appear that this is no longer the case.

Update: Ambinder adds some important detail:

One way to figure out what’s going on is to look at the talking points the Obama campaign has sent to surrogates about Iraq. As of 7/3, those TPs say that Obama will “immediately” begin to withdraw combat troops. The TPs don’t say anything about consulting with generals or facts on the ground. 

Second Update: On cue, Sullivan says:

I don”t think that’s fair: there’s a distinction between cynical and pragmatic. 

That’s true.  “Pragmatic” is what a politician’s supporters call one of his cynical moves.  The distinction is clear.  There is another.  Cynicism at least presupposes that all firm commitments and ideals are empty and meaningless.  Pragmatism takes for granted that there are principled positions that the pragmatists refuse to adopt.

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.