/ time may change me / but you can't trace time /
Watching Barak Obama's climb from nameless state senator to Democratic frontrunner has been an interesting one.
Watching his gradual slide from the liberal end of the spectrum to something more moderate, though, has been thoroughly entertaining.
For the life of me, I can't figure out how someone who runs as the candidate of hope can possibly expect to run successfully through November when he appears to be nothing more than a maneuvering politician as it comes time to face the general voting population in America - a population that remains historically more conservative than all the hope in the world could change.
My good friend Greg over at the Office of the Independent Blogger linked to a piece from the Wall Street Journal focusing on the growing similarities between Obama's campaign posturing and Bush's own posturing. Granted, these similarities are slight, but they should be troubling to the true-believers out there who might've been holding out for this guy to remain true to his roots.
Of course, the other side of the coin is John McCain's absolute inability to sell himself as anything but an angry old man.
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I was in the midst of collecting the data on why I believed this when someone over on the Daily Kos did my job for me. There's a diary over there entitled "Obama, the flip-flopper? Give me a break." that bears reading. It documents pretty clear that the "shifted" positions most cited lately are extremely close to what he's been saying all along.
I know that the right has been feeding us the line that he is "the most Liberal Senator", but it just isn't true. He has been somewhere in the moderate left part of the spectrum all along.
A classic case is the whole brouhaha over his support of the "Faith Based Initiative" notion. He started both his political career and his religious life while working as a community organizer coordinating the social action of churches. It isn't a change for him to believe that faith-based organizations can be effective in the are of social justice, or to think that so long as care is taken to separate their good works from their religious activity it might make sense for government to encourage or support their work.
I'm sure my rabidly atheistic left wing friends are shocked that someone they support would take this stand, but they are a decade or two behind in noting that he is a man of faith who supports faith-based organizations.
Similarly, as a ConLaw professor, Obama has always believed in balancing the second amendment guarantees against public safety. Expecting him to support laws as broad as the DC handgun ban was unrealistic.
Read the list over at DKos.