It’s weird to be disappointed when I think I always knew this would happen.
Quite a week for Barack Obama:
- On Saturday, he went back on his pledge to accept public funding;
- On Monday, he helped make Still-President Bush’s illegal wire-tapping program legal;
- On Wednesday, he denounced the Supreme Court’s ban on the death penalty for child rapists;
- And today, he endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to bring handguns back to Washington after 32 years.
We’ve had hints before of the ruthlessness of his campaign – reports that access to the candidate was incredibly tightly controlled, as well as the recent controversy over two Muslim women allegedly being prevented from sitting in shot with him.
Just as politicians like to bury bad news on Fridays, it’s clear that this is an attempt by Obama to shift rapidly to the centre, without having to eke out the flip-flopping over months. (Though to be fair, not all of those stories involve U-turns – some just involve him taking a right.)
There’s only so much bad press you can garner in a week. Obama is ahead in the polls, and following his reversal on public funding, massively ahead financially. This was a good time to throw it all out there, too hard and too fast for McCain to do much about it. His supporters will be annoyed, and then – for the most part – they will forget. I’ll be interested to see how the prominent Daily Kos regulars take it – some are already furious over the wiretapping bill. Will they forget?
In theory, I don’t have much of a problem with this. I don’t begrudge politicians the right to compromise, and to selectively move towards the centre – it’s disappointing, but it’s how the system works. I don’t think there’s any great morality in being Tony Benn: he who has always been an inspirational figure of the British left, but who will leave behind a lot of diaries about how right he was, and not much else. The total impact of high-minded ideas that are never put into action is zero.
So if Obama takes the Presidency from the centre and then gently steers the country to the left, that’ll be okay. If he manages to implement universal health care and nothing else, that’ll be enough.
I don’t live in America, so I don’t have to vote for him, or not vote for him. And I’m still almost certain that he’s the next President – if anything, more certain than I was a week ago. But there was always going to be a point where you had to accept that he was simply a politician. I arrived at that point today.
