Lefty blogger Glenn Greenwald does a nice job documenting Barack Obama’s serial betrayals of the last two weeks:
Here’s what I don’t get: Obama spent the entire primary season showing a shocking breadth of ignorance on a staggering array of issues. As I’ve written many times, he has never come across as a man who has given policy matters much serious thought. It was a telling moment when he was photographed with Fareed Zakaria’s latest book. While I thought the book was weak, even if one thought otherwise it still inarguably wasn’t exactly groundbreaking in any scholarly or philosophical sense. It was the thinly footnoted ramblings of a Newsweek columnist. Little in it would have been new (except for the fact that America is defintiely in decline because we no longer have the world’s biggest Ferris Wheel) to a wonk or a big-brained Harvard law grad who had been pondering significant matters for decades. The fact that Obama had possibly turned to it as a potential repository of deep thoughts was equal parts disturbing and laughable. The point is this: Whatever positions Obama has espoused have not been the result of a hard-earned and rigorously arrived at political philosophy. As such, his positions will inevitably prove malleable as he goes through the process of familiarizing himself with policy debates. To put it another way, can you really flop if you never flipped in the first place? Or try another formulation: Is Obama such an attractive figure and his hope/change shtick so alluring that we should just give him the presidency and let him figure out where he stands once he gets into office?
