Going after Sarah Palin, who favored the so-called “bridge to nowhere” before she turned against it, Barack Obama said you just can’t stand for things contrary to positions you once took. He was forgetting, I guess, that such is the heart of his campaign.
After all, Obama was negative on free trade pacts and then said he was a free-trade kind of guy; was hesitant about nuclear power, but now wants more; was for public financing of campaigns, then figured that wasn’t for him; was against an aggressive surveillance law, then voted for it; was devoted to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then renounced him; was opposed to offshore drilling, then decided some might be okay, and insisted the surge would never work, then called it a success.
Fine. Live and learn. But at some point, we voters might become confused about whether the real Obama is the one who took position “A” or the one who took position “B”. And nowhere is the issue of more concern than his current stance in favor of building up the military. Go back a year ago and it sounded like dismantlement was his game.
“I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending,” Obama said in a message aimed at an Iowa group wanting to slash Pentagon funding. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems . . . I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal.”
Any doubts that he uttered those words can be disproved by three million witnesses. That’s the number of people who watched his little speech on YouTube. His own campaign put the video there, maybe not expecting that, down the road, Obama would be talking about going against the grain of his own party by actually enlarging the military, while a spokesman warned against expectations of near-term spending reductions in an Obama administration.
There’s reason to worry that the first position – not the second, more reasoned and reassuring one – represents the deepest inner urges of the Democratic candidate because he still hints at similar impulses. Example: His campaign’s official Web site now says he “will support missile defense,” though adding that it must “not divert resources from other national security priorities until we are positive the technology will protect the American public.”
Well, to get the technology in working order, you’re going to have to spend lots of money. If you want to be “positive” before major investments, you will never get there, and could put this country in harm’s way.
Everyone wants to cut waste, of course, including John McCain, who has insisted on tough competitive bidding on weapons at some political risk and fought against programs he thought were pointless. But he also knows that ours remains a dangerous world of declared and potential enemies and that it takes constant reinvestment in our military to keep it up to snuff.
That doesn’t make McCain a war-monger, as some suggest, for nothing invites war like weakness. Yes, the cost of strength is high, but not nearly so high as some seem to assume.
I recently happened across the fact that, even if you include all the spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, defense costs consume just 20 percent of our budget, far lower than during the Cold War and significantly less than the 60 percent that goes to entitlement programs.
Whether Obama gets all of this, and whether his latest position is the one he most believes, is something the country is going to have to try to figure out.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
