Everyone Doesn't Do it

Everyone agrees, don’t they, that candidates appeal to the base in their primary campaigns and then they tack to the center when it’s time for the general. Agreed?

And nobody has done that more completely and ruthlessly than Sen. Barack Obama (B-IL). As Tony Blankley writes:

[I]f there are two things people know about Barack Obama, one of them is that he recently has changed his positions on abortion, gun control, capital punishment, FISA laws, the status of Jerusalem, faith-based federal programs, public financing of his campaign, welfare, NAFTA and free trade, the surge in Iraq, and his commitment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church, among other public policies.

But just a minute. Just how much did presidential candidates do this sort of thing in the past?

Let’s review a few. Candidate Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” right through the 2000 election cycle. And then there was Ronald Reagan:

Who can forget Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, when he came out for tax cuts, lower social spending and more military spending in the primary, only to back away from those policies in the general election when he famously said: "I got a little rhetorically over-excited during the primary. On closer examination, President Carter seems to have built up our defenses sufficiently. We will have to see about those tax cuts; we may need the revenues for more social spending."

Not!

Writes Blankley:

I am not aware of anything remotely comparable to Sen. Obama’s recent reversals of positions.

So what is going on? Here’s a theory. You need to bear sharp left to win the Democratic nomination because of the crazy left. But you can’t possibly win on the left’s agenda. So every Democratic candidate has to tack, more or less, to the center to get elected.

That is the reality. But to cover it up (not to us, but to itself) the mainstream media makes up the notion that everyone does it.

Rush Limbaugh says: Liberals can’t win by being themselves. But it’s worse than that. Liberals can’t even be themselves to themselves.