A blank screen!

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Obama hopes to let voters define what "hope" and "change" mean to them and then hang that on his candidacy. They define it, he pretends to agree with it by talking in glittering generalities, he gets elected and then the political bill comes due.

Krugman Is Stumped, Too

Jennifer Rubin - 06.30.2008 - 8:17 AM

Hey, it’s not just Republican surrogates who are making the point that Barack Obama is “unprincipled and opportunistic.” Joining fellow New York Times columnist David Brooks on the list of those Obama has utterly confused, Paul Krugman debates with himself whether Obama is more like Ronald Reagan (an ideological, transformative politician) or Bill Clinton ( a poll-driven prgamatist). He writes:

"The candidate’s defenders argue that he’s just being pragmatic — that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same “triangulation and poll-driven politics” he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands. In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all."

It is remarkable that now two savvy guys like Krugman and Brooks can’t figure out what Obama is. And neither seems to be playing coy to make a rhetorical point — they really don’t know.

But maybe that’s no accident. Obama has told us there is no there, there. In his book he wrote: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” So perhaps searching for Obama’s “core” is a fool’s errand. He is glib and clever and seized upon a clever formulation (Agent of Change) to attract young and idealistic people longing for meaning. But perhaps that is all there is.

We don’t know how he will act under pressure and in real circumstances demanding definitive action because he has never developed, stuck with and acted upon a fixed set of principles. So voters will have to figure out for themselves which polar opposite vision of Obama is the real one. The fact that both could be in contention is startling and sobering.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/in...php/rubin/13811

Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books explains the phenomenon:

Of all the presidential contenders slogans this year, Barack Obama as had been the most interesting. His campaign creed is "Yes, we can." To which any reasonable person would ask: "can what"? The answer, of course, is: "Hope." Bbut again, a reasonable person might ask: "Hope for what?" To which the answer confidently comes back from the Obama campaign: "For change." Indeed, Obama's signs say: "Change We Can Believe In", as opposed, one supposes, to unbelievable changes. But the elementary problem with this — which any student of logic might raise — is that change can be for the better or for the worse.

Democrats in general, I would submit, confuse change with improvement. They fail to weigh the costs and benefits of change, to consider its unintended consequences, or to worry about what we need to conserve and how we might go about doing this faithfully. They ask Americans to embrace change for its own sake, in the faith that history is governed by a law of progress, which guarantees that change is almost always an improvement. The ability to bring about historical change, then becomes the highest mark of a liberal leader. Thus Hillary Clinton quickly joined Obama on the change bandwagon. Her initial claim of experience sounded in retrospect a bit too boring — indeed, almost Republican in its plainess. So "Ready on Day One" morphed into "Ready for Change."

So here we are, as a country, on the verge of electing someone who admits to being "a blank screen". Whose resume is so sparse that most businesses would be wary of hiring him for middle management and who painfully reminds us daily of his lack of experience, his lack of substance and his lack of any real leadership experience.

If we're reduced to Krugman's two choices, I'd have to go with "a poll-driven pragamatist", but in the mold of Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton.

Thanks MQ