The Democratic nominee opposed offshore oil drilling, but changed his mind.
When Hillary Clinton was taking a commanding lead in the polls in Florida and Michigan, he was staunchly against seating the delegations from states which had defied the party’s calendar, but over the weekend, in the interests of a smooth convention, he relented.
Obama’s camp might complain that the press missed the nuance of his energy proposal Monday, when he suggested drawing down 70 million barrels from the strategic oil reserve in a swap with 70 million barrels of heavy oil to be deposited later. Still, this did represent a shift from he previous disdain for tapping the emergency supply.
And this was in the span of less than a week. There’s also his opting out of public financing for the general election campaign despite his previous pledge to do so, his vote for the renewal of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act despite his earlier condemnation of its wiretapping procedures, and his fudging over when troops should be withdrawn from Iraq.
Analyzed separately, any one of these changes in position might be defended as justifiable on some pragmatic grounds. Pragmatic in general’s not a bad thing. But at what point does Obama’s willingness to change positions become a liability? Slight adjustments can be wise policy, but risky politics when your campaign has been painted in bold colors.
It’s not the already disillusioned liberals, who will only vote for Obama less enthusiastically than they would have, that Obama’s campaign has to worry about. It’s those Americans we wrote about recently who are returning from or still at the beach, and haven’t really thought as much about who they’re going to vote for as their neighbors. They’re not going to agree with either candidate on everything, but they have to get a quick sense of what they stand for, and that’s where Obama has problems.
John McCain was quick to pounce Monday, with the comment that keeping your tires inflated doesn’t amount to an energy policy. Obama might have countered that giving businesses tax breaks for operating SUVs and big trucks doesn’t amount to an energy policy, either.
The big argument over energy isn’t about any particular method of extraction or use – all of which come with some cost – but the broad direction the country takes. That’s a debate, given the current political climate, which the Democratic candidate in this race has a good chance of winning.
But not if he approaches it as if he were president already.
