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By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Flip-Flopping — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

So reports Jonathan Last in considering the state of the Obama campaign:

In the wake of last week's Supreme Court ruling overturning Washington's handgun ban, for instance, the Obama campaign disavowed a 2007 statement it had made about the constitutionality of gun laws as "inartful."

After claiming in May that he would debate John McCain "anytime, any place," Obama declined to participate in a series of 10 town hall-style meetings, which the McCain campaign proposed.

Early in the month, it became clear that the head of Obama's VP search committee, Jim Johnson, was compromised by his ties to the subprime lender Countrywide. Obama called the story "overblown and irrelevant." Two days later Johnson was cashiered.

Of course that's all just campaign mechanics. But Obama has been reversing himself on policy, too.

In October, the Obama campaign promised that the senator would support a filibuster of any FISA bill that would grant retroactive immunity for telecom companies who helped the government with wiretapping. Last week, Obama announced that he would not filibuster the new FISA bill (which contains wiretapping immunity), and that instead he planned to vote for it.

At a dinner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, Obama promised that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." Later, an Obama adviser clarified that Obama did not mean that Jerusalem should be literally "not divided."

Here's the campaign's confusing explanation: "So [Obama] used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East." It remains unclear what situation Obama sees as preferable for Israel's capital.

There is a lot more in the article. Of course, Last writes for the Weekly Standard so there will be more than a few people who dismiss his critiques as being ideologically driven. But the flip-flops are being noted in ideologically friendly fora as well--like this one--and they threaten to undermine Obama's status as a new kind of politician selling a new kind of politics. It should be noted, of course, that Obama's attempts to shift to the center do exceedingly little to assuage the concerns of centrists and right-of-center voters who are aware of Obama's voting record and his rhetoric during the primary and caucus season--both of which are at variance with his new and conveniently found "centrism." Meanwhile, efforts to shift to the center are increasingly outraging and infuriating Obama's base, a fact that is especially obvious in the reaction of Obama's base to his decision to support FISA reforms. The Obama campaign is paying lip service at best to centrists, moderates and right-of-center voters and alienating its own base; a neat trick and a wholly unexpected one given that until recently, the campaign was operating on all cylinders and carrying out its duties in competent fashion.