Now Wait Just A Darned Minute!

Obots: pay attention!  Your messiah has been lying to you.

Adding to the rapidly expanding archives of 'Told You So' turnarounds, here is some more evidence that Obama is breaking promises all around.

Missile Defense
Remember this?  On the campaign trail, Obama pledged to cut missile defense and other key programs.  Here's what his new policy looks like:

In keeping with the Geraghty Axiom of Barack Obama, the expiration date of the President-Elect's opposition to missile defense appears to be January 20, 2009, at least according to Time.  Mark Thompson reports that missile defense has come too far for any President to shut it down, and the Russian challenge will force Obama to show toughness by continuing it:

Missile-defense skeptics yearning for a fresh look at the wisdom of pumping $10 billion annually into missile defense aren't going to get it from Barack Obama when he moves into the Oval Office. The Russians — along with the two men most likely to end up running the Pentagon for the President-elect — have already made sure of that. It's a bracing reminder of just how difficult it is to counter momentum once a big-league defense program achieves what aerodynamicists call "escape velocity" — that synergy of speed and gravity that lets a vehicle soar smoothly into the skies. …

If Obama keeps Defense Secretary Robert Gates on, as some advisers are arguing he should, that would come as no surprise.

The challenge from Dmitry Medvedev has made continuing the program all but certain, Thompson says.  Medvedev's attempts to intimidate eastern Europe, NATO, and the US put Obama in a very difficult position.  He cannot just acquiesce to Medvedev's demands now and withdraw the missile defense without looking frightened, which would create more problems as Russia continues to assert itself in Europe and Asia.

While this turnaround is certain to enrage the anti-war Left, it is very, very good news for American defense.


Indefinite detention
On the campaign trail, Obama has said that closing Gitmo is a 'priority' for him.  But...not so fast...

Earlier today, I noted that Barack Obama's team has started hinting that they will move back towards John McCain's position on interrogation techniqiues.  Now supporters of Obama who have criticized the Bush administration's position on indefinite detention have begun rethinking that policy as well:

As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration's military commission system.

Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers. They include where Guantánamo's detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?

Now that Obama has to live with these decisions and not simply snipe from the sidelines, the game appears to have changed.  A month ago, the NYT's editorial board scoffed at the Bush administration's efforts to keep Gitmo detainees from being released as merely a way to avoid bad press and not to keep dangerous people from killing Americans.  Suddenly, the New York Times discovers that the American system does allow for indefinite detention to protect society from dangerous individuals without full-blown criminal trials — as with the criminally insane.

So what happens when the incoming Obama administration decides to continue indefinite detention and back away from Feinstein's bill on interrogation techniques?  Not only will the MoveOn/Code Pink crowd utterly revolt, but it will force a re-evaluation of the Bush administration's efforts to keep this nation safe from attack — and the success he had in doing so.

Once again, this is likely to outrage his kook Left base, but this is music to my ears!  I sincerely hope he follows through on this particular broken campaign promise!


Lobbyists are eeeeeevil!
On the campaign trail, Barack Obama made a habit out of accusing McCain of rubbing shoulders with eeeeevil lobbyists despite the fact that he took more money from them himself.  Now, however, lobbyists apparently aren't that bad...

Obama has tapped a number of lobbyists for high-profile positions in the transition team, and most of them will likely end up with significant leadership roles in the coming Obama administration:

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to change Washington, vowing to upend the K Street lobbying culture he encountered when he joined the U.S. Senate.

But more than a dozen members of President-elect Obama's fast-growing transition team have worked as federally registered lobbyists within the past four years. They include former lobbyists for the nation's trial lawyers association, mortgage giant Fannie Mae, drug companies such as Amgen, high-tech firms such as Microsoft, labor unions and the liberal advocacy group Center for American Progress.

Mark Gitenstein, one of the 12 transition board members who will play a significant role in shaping the Obama administration, worked on million-dollar lobbying contracts with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and promoted legislation for giant defense contractors Boeing and General Dynamics. Until this fall, he was registered to petition Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of AT&T, Merrill Lynch, KPMG, Ernst & Young and others.

Matthew Mosk notes the other significant lobbyists now rising to power under President Hope N. Change:

• Ron Klain - Joe Biden's chief of staff, had lobbied for Fannie Mae on "regulatory matters" until 2004, when the fraud got uncovered after years of Congressional interference with regulators.  Klain also lobbied for companies defending asbestos lawsuits and for ImClone, the drugmaker that faced charges of fraud.
• John Podesta - The man running Obama's transition spent the last few years lobbying for the far-Left group Center for American Progress.
• Patrick Gaspard - Lobbied on health care issues on behalf of the SEIU, now associate personnel director for the transition team

Podesta has an even more interesting tie to lobbying.  Bill Clinton enacted a five-year ban on former White House staffers lobbying present and future administrations in order to curtail influence peddling.  However, after George Bush won in 2000, Clinton rescinded the order to help his staffers get jobs in the wake of the Republican sweep to victory.  The man who helped write the revocation?  John Podesta.

There is nothing inherently wrong with lobbying.  There is plenty wrong with hypocrisy, especially on the grand scale committed by Barack Obama during this campaign.

Hm, how about that?  Similarly, Obama has picked Eric H. Holder, Jr. to be his Attorney General.  This is a guy deeply involved in the Bill Clinton-Mark Rich pardon scandal years ago.  Is that the kind of change you were expecting?


Domestic terrorist Bill Ayers
On the campaign trail, Obama promised the American people that domestic terrorist Bill Ayers was 'just a guy my neighborhood'.  Now, however, Ayers himself contradicts that notion:

"We had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I'd made a small donation to his earliest political campaign," he writes.

More here and here.  Disgusting, not only from the relationship aspect of it, but also from the deliberate refusal of the media to cover the relationship at all until after the election is safely concluded.


Health care
On the campaign trail (and long before), Obama repeatedly promised a universal single-payer system of government-run health care.  Now, he's backpedaling...

On June 30, 2003, Illinois state senator Barack Obama spoke to a gathering of AFL-CIO officials and declared his unequivocal support for a government takeover of our medical delivery system: "I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program." He went on to cite the standard "progressive" pretext for his statist vision: "I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody."

Fast forward to January 21, 2008: During the Democrat presidential debate sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama responded to Senator Clinton's charge that he had flip-flopped on government-run health care by saying, "I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single payer." Then, taking advantage of the stunned silence precipitated by this brazen whopper, Obama attempted to give the tale verisimilitude to by adding a retroactive caveat: "What I said was that if I were starting from scratch ... I would probably go with a single-payer system."

David Catron makes the argument that Obama will probably go whichever way the wind is blowing on this once he's in office.  It is likely he'll end up coming back around to his original pledge with the Dems in Congress, but it's still another example of how Obama said whatever his audience wanted to hear.  Some of us call that lying, but I don't think the Left feels comfortable with that terminology.  A rose by any other name...

The point of all this is to illustrate my previous warnings that Obama is in a lose-lose situation.  By going too far to the Left, he risks a serious backlash that could boot a bunch of Dems out in 2010; by going too far to the center, he risks angering his base by turning around on many of his campaign promises.  While most of these turnarounds would be good in my opinion, I'm not convinced he'll go all the way with them.  Still, I'll take what I can get - any dilution of what Obama campaigned on is a good thing in my book!

For those of you on the Left who are angered by these turnarounds: how does it feel to have your guy compromise on your core values?  Not exactly the change you were hoping for, is it?

It's tough being a messiah.

There's my two cents.