Required Reading

1) From the New York Times, "My Plan for Iraq" by Barack Obama.

Barack Obama and his minions are responding fiercely albeit ineffectively to the notion that the presumptive Democratic nominee is a flip-flopper. They figure they have to respond in this fashion, since flip-flopping doomed John Kerry's campaign. Well, flip-flopping and swiftboating.

But John Kerry wasn't a flip-flopper. Seriously. I'm from Massachusetts, so I know. Kerry was something much worse - a straddler. Actually, he was something much, much worse - a clumsy and maladroit straddler.

Throughout his political career, Kerry has had a pathological need to get on both sides of hot button issues. During the presidential campaign, this tendency raised its hideous head several times. Everyone remembers the infamous I-voted-for-it-before-I-voted-against-it line, but more telling was Kerry's little pirouette on abortion. One day, Kerry asserted his total commitment to a woman's right to choose. With his next breath, he reminded the press corps that as a matter of his Catholic faith he did however consider abortion murder.

People from Massachusetts had long grown accustomed to this Kerry habit long before he won the Democratic nomination, and it's why we couldn't believe the Democratic party had been so foolish to tab Kerry. Gephardt wouldn't have been that bad! Straddles like the abortion one had the precise opposite effect of what Kerry intended - they annoyed each and every voter, regardless of where he stood on the substantive issue. In my earliest blogging days, I referred to Kerry's uncanny ability to bug both sides while employing craven efforts to please both sides as "The Kerry Magic."

Incredibly, Barack Obama is showing the same habit. The members of the left who are still fuming over his FISA betrayal will recognize the disingenuous and downright Kerry-esque penchant for seizing both sides of an issue. Remember that thing he posted on his website about how much he hated the bill that he had just supported?

The fact is, flip-flopping won't lead to Obama's doom. The public expects its politicians to flip-flop or to evolve or to lie - choose whichever term of art is most to your liking. The Kennedys had a brilliant line that they used to explain their evolutions: It's not where you come from, but where you stand. But the public does demand some reasonable level of clarity on where a politician stands.

On Iraq, Team Obama has become stuck in a quagmire of confusion. On Meet the Press yesterday, leading Obama surrogate Claire McCaskill said that Obama's 16 month surrender plan in Iraq is a "goal" and added it would be "irresponsible for a commander-in-chief to set a date in stone."

And yet today, the titular head of Team Obama took to the pages of New York Times and declared:

We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 - two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

That sounds sort of "set in stone" to me. Meanwhile Obama is trotting off to Iraq this week with "Republican" Chuck Hagel in tow to lend the voyage some military bona fides. Hagel's the guy who long ago called the surge, "The most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Then again, I guess Hagel still makes a far more credible traveling companion than Harry Reid would.

And what's the purpose of this trip? Ostensibly to talk to the commanders so Obama can further refine his plan which isn't set in stone. Unless you like it as is, in which case you may consider it set in stone. Until further notice.

2) From the New Yorker, "Cover Illustration of the Obamas" (seen below) by some guy who really pissed off a lot of people.