Posted by
Juliana Johnson on Monday, August 25, 2008 1:20:55 PM
Barack Obama learned an important lesson from John Kerry's 2004
Presidential campaign--do not express two contradictory positions in
the same sentence. Instead, wait awhile.
Kerry infamously
contended in a single statement that he had voted for funding for our
troops in Iraq and Afghanistan before he voted against the funding.
Conversely,
Obama has smartly spread out his flip-flops. During the primary, Obama
asserted that qualification for the Presidency should be measured
primarily on the basis of one's judgment not their experience.
During the primary, we were told by Obama that Washington was broken and that Washington insiders were the problem.
During
the primary, we were invited to feast on the munificence of Obama's
fierce urgency for a new kind of politics marinated in the special
sauce of his uplifting rhetoric.
And then on Saturday, it turned
out that experience does matter; that being a Washington insider for 35
years is not such a bad thing; and that the trite class envy political
rhetoric of the Left should indeed be central to this campaign.
It
turned out that those things are also more important than one's
personal judgment particularly relative to their public integrity, as
Obama's running mate has a troubling tendency of confusing the work and
words of others for his own.
Just as we are entering the
homestretch of this possibly historic and probably transformational
campaign (so we were told), it turns out that Obama is just another
craven politician.
Thus, the spectacle of Obama, the great
consensus-builder, gleefully presiding over Hacksaw Joe Biden's
formulaic pillorying of McCain during what passed for his acceptance
speech as Obama's vice presidential nominee on Saturday in Springfield.
"Ladies
and gentlemen, your kitchen table is like mine," said Biden. "You talk
about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Well,
ladies and gentlemen, that's not a worry John McCain has to worry
about. It's a pretty hard experience. He'll have to figure out which of
the seven kitchen tables to sit at."
Obama and Biden are apparently living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Obama
speaks of hope and employs cynicism. Obama speaks of judgment and he
abides the lack of it. Obama fancies himself transcendental and yet,
other than the telegenic physical packaging, remains mired in the
failed conventions of big government liberalism.
So then if Obama doesn't believe his own rhetoric, why should we?