Nixon and Clinton are looking better

Yesterday, I suggested that Obama left Nixon and Clinton in the dust for deviousness and opportunism. Today, Charles Krauthammer tallies up the record. He starts off with a big one.

“To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”
–– Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007

That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he’ll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.

He lists more opportunistic reversals:

NAFTA, which he was against until he was for it
Meeting with Iran, which he would do without precautions, until he started adding them
Public financing, which he favored until there was more money elsewhere
Jeremiah Wright, who was in, then out
Grandma, who was out, then in
Krauthammer leaves out Obama’s sudden attachment to the death penalty and to the right to bear arms.

The press gets a well deserved blast:

As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama’s abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight –– switching sides in World War II, for example –– whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.
But the bigger blast is for Obama:

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. “He does what politicians do,” explained Jeremiah Wright.
When it’s time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia — only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama’s fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he’s finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

Hell, he already has.
UPDATE: At The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen says that Obama’s views on the death penalty are long standing.
Many liberals may be inclined to view Barack Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court decision banning execution of child rapists as the worst kind of poll driven pandering–akin to Bill Clinton’s decision to fly home to Arkansas during the 1992 election to permit the execution of the mentally handicapped Ricky Ray Rector. I disagree. In fact, Obama’s support for the execution of child rapists wasn’t invented for the presidential election; it dates back to The Audacity of Hope, where he wrote: “While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes–mass murder, the rape and murder of a child–so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.” His longstanding opinion on the death penalty is a particularly nuanced one. He has opposed expanding the death penalty to include gang activity, for example, on the grounds that it would disproportionately punish men of color, but he supports the execution of especially egregious murderers who are clearly guilty.
Fair enough, although I fail to see how this says much for Obama. Clinton’s two Supreme Court appointees, Breyer and Ginsburg, voted to give the child rapist a break, and there is no indication that Obama (or Clinton) is disappointed with either appointment, whereas Souter and Kennedy are widely viewed among Republicans as awful appointments, and both Reagan and Bush probably would concede they were mistaken appointments. The paragraph does not say much for Rosen’s intellect either, for all his fancy degrees. Calling Obama’s position “nuanced” seems a bit odd for a candidate whose support of a limited use of the death penalty (subject to a racial quota; how very nuanced) is backed up by no substantive commitments of any sorts.