Where's the Change?

by Steve Soto

Over the weekend, two major newspapers came to roughly the same conclusion about Barack Obama’s behavior since he vanquished Hillary Clinton as a new kind of change candidate: he’s moving to the center, or beyond. Both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post took a look at Obama’s recent comments on last week’s Supreme Court decisions, his FISA flip-flop, his NAFTA-won’t-be-changed flip-flop, and concluded that rather than being a “change we can believe in” candidate, he is redefining himself as a safe centrist candidate.

Matt Stoller did an outstanding job Saturday pointing out that despite the rhetoric, Obama isn’t really an outsider running as a change candidate progressive, but rather as a front person for Beltway Democrats from K Street. I’ll go a step further: there are two major camps in the party, the Clinton wing and the anti-Clintons. Neither camp is progressive, and Obama is simply the salesman for the anti-Clinton, Daschle status quo. Yet he has taken over the party, leaving progressivism dead in the water.

Moreover, these pieces in the LAT and Post were written before Obama’s campaign signaled that there weren’t any Democrats good enough to be Secretary of Defense, and that he would be fine with keeping Robert Gates as SecDef, something that the Beltway insiders who gave us this foreign policy would greatly approve of.

Instead of running a campaign touting true change from decades of conservative corporate dominance, Obama is reacting to McCain by painting himself to be a better centrist to comfort the same crowd that has run this country into the ground. However, there is no change in that message, besides an empty nonpartisanism that masks a status quo. If voters wanted another four years of the status quo, why wouldn’t they choose McCain instead of someone who can be painted now as an unprincipled opportunist?

I suspect that after another month of Obama’s jettisoning of anything looking like progressive change, there will be more and more people like me whose vote for him this November is really just a vote against Bush's third term.

Update (11 AM PDT): Obama’s distancing continues today. He does a ‘Sista Souljah’ on MoveOn.org, on an issue that was dead and didn’t need to be resuscitated, unless you were aiming to score points at your allies’ expense.

And he followed up by distancing himself from Wesley Clark’s comments yesterday that McCain’s imprisonment and lack of command experience doesn’t make him more qualified to be commander in chief and unassailable. Clark was responding to, and trying to rebut McCain’s newest ad campaign, which overtly plays upon his imprisonment as a way to draw a contrast with Obama. Clark’s comments have been cropped and he has been smeared, and yet Obama threw him under the bus anyway. Furthermore, the Obama campaign fell down by not running an effective Tier Two effort and being prepared for whatever surrogates say. Clark and Joe Biden have been doing surrogate work for weeks. In effect, Obama has just discredited Clark as a surrogate for good, putting him out on an island by himself. And in the process, he has just fire-walled McCain from any criticism of his record on military or national security matters, which as Obama supporter Josh Marshall noted, was unwise and totally unnecessary.