David Brooks has a provocative piece today in which he suggests that Barack Obama perfectly combines egghead idealism with Machiavellianism:

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there's Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who'd throw you under the truck for votes.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He's the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he's too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

Predictably, Andrew Sullivan seconds the emotion, gushing, "I never doubted his cunning or his charisma. It's the combo that's so lethal. Are the Republicans awake yet? The Clintons weren't." And thus a new narrative is born! Obama is not only the high-minded agent of change, but he has the gutter instincts necessary to operate in a dangerous world populated with your Kim Jong Il types.

The jumping off point for this theory was Obama's "cunning" rejection of public financing. I'll agree with this much - it would have been political malpractice for Obama to agree to public funding. You don't give away hundreds of millions of dollars in asset advantages in a competitive presidential race if you're in it to win it.

But the public funding wouldn't be an issue, and it wouldn't be disillusioning such Obama champions as the editorial boards at the Boston Globe and the New York Times, if Obama hadn't previously pledged to participate in public funding. You know what would have been cunning? If Obama, instead of pledging to take public funding, had said something like, "I am a strong proponent of public funding for elections. But our current public funding system, one that was designed by John McCain, is deeply flawed. I will not participate in the system if I determine doing so would be to the detriment to my party, my campaign and my country." He could even have worn his flag pin lapel on the day he made the announcement to hype the patriotism of the whole shebang. Such a comment would have preserved his options and the moral high ground, things he pissed away when he recklessly pledged to "aggressively" pursue public financing.

I'm sorry, but to my eyes this episode doesn't seem like an adventure in shrewdness. It's yet another example of a rookie candidate spouting off while having no idea what he's talking about.

You may have noticed, Obama makes a habit of issuing sweeping statements that he later has to back down from. While addressing AIPAC ten days ago, Obama asserted, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." The guys at AIPAC were nuts for the pronouncement - the Palestinians less so. Mahmoud Abbas somberly declared, "He has closed all doors to peace."

Since every presidential wannabe, regardless of party, dreams of being the guy who convinces the Palestinians to beat their swords into ploughshares, Obama had to back down from the comment and have an aide lamely claim that he was merely talking about "a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones. So he 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." And thus, he began appeasing even before winning election!

So was that another sterling example of "cunning" or instead an illustration of a candidate who doesn't know what he's talking about?