Ralph Waldo Emerson was only half right: While foolish
consistency moonlights as the hobgoblin of little minds, it is also
the Holy Grail of varsity-level democratic politics, because voters
want to know where a candidate stands, especially when he or she
aspires to the Oval Office.
Some people are more forgiving of inconsistency than others.
Asked to comment on presidential politics, California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger volunteered that he thinks Republican Senator
John McCain is too far right. On the Democrat side of the aisle,
Schwarzenegger pronounced himself unruffled by arguments over
whether the messages that Senator Barack Obama has been retooling
actually subvert the narrative they were supposed to improve.
“Flip-flopping is getting a bad rap, because I think it is
great,” Schwarzenegger told ABC. “Someone has made a mistake. I
mean, someone has, for 20 or 30 years, been in the wrong place with
his idea and with his ideology and says, ‘You know something? I
changed my mind. I am now for this. As long as he’s honest or she’s
honest, I think that is a wonderful thing.”
Begging the governor’s pardon, but a clarification may help:
when a change of mind marks intellectual or moral growth, then it
is indeed a wonderful thing. But not every change of mind meets
such criteria, which is why rapid shifts can also be dizzying or
cringe-inducing, as Janet Albrechtsen observed while commenting on
the speed with which Obama performs “the Potomac Shuffle.” Such
haste makes it hard to believe that anything other than political
expediency can account for Obama’s willingness to revisit the
positions for which he is already known.
“Presidential candidates traditionally move centre to shore up
the swing voters and try to take votes from their opponents,”
Albrechtsen
explained to readers of The Australian. “But even by
the standards of yore, Obama is, as one American commentator said,
‘quite a mover on the dance floor.’”
The problem, in a nutshell, is that more people are watching the
“dance floor” than ever before. In an age of blogging, YouTube, Web
news forums, and talk radio, “plausible deniability” and the
“modified limited hangout” are forms of evasion as obsolete as
dances like the Locomotion and the Macarena. Nowadays the bouncer
at the Information Club is everyone’s best friend, and almost
anyone who wants to can “go to the videotape,” as the late Tim
Russert was fond of saying.
Moreover, having been taught to pay more attention by a
Democratic president who enlivened the impeachment proceedings
against him by disputing the meaning of verb “is,” we all know
we’re in for backpedaling when any politician seeks to “clarify”
previous remarks. The hothouse political climate bequeathed to the
republic by Team Clinton and its full-time “War Room” makes even
Obamanian refinement of a position on troops in Iraq look like an
attempt to move the goal posts, and cynicism of that kind is
especially toxic to a candidacy fueled by appeals to judgment
rather than experience. Having spent half of the last decade running for office, Obama does not
even start with the assets that Eddie Murphy’s character had in
“Trading Places,” when he tried to convince disbelieving cops that
he had served in Vietnam by citing deployment with a “Green Beret
Specialist Tactics Unit Battalion” to places like “Sang Bang” and
“Dang Gong.”
Look again at the qualifier buried in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
seemingly jovial defense of politics as usual: Behind the cigar and
the accent that gets more pronounced when he wants it to, the
Austrian-American operator is a shrewd cookie who knows that if a
change of mind is going to be Some Kind of Wonderful, it must first
be honest. That some of us hoot derisively at rhetoric from Barack
Obama has a lot to do with what one bookworm friend sarcastically
calls his “rabbinic wisdom,” and his unwillingness to admit when he
changes his mind. The junior senator’s apparent belief that he
alone is capable of parsing his own speech was never tenable to
begin with, and sometimes what he does not say is as telling as
what he does say.
The asterisked items on the grievance list are familiar:
ignoring a promise to accept public financing, embracing a troop
surge he had sneered at, and failing to make good on a threat to
filibuster against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In
each case, the “nuanced” sequel to an original position was
defended as Not His Fault. Beyond that, and in deference to some
kind of twisted sister pluralism unknown to the congregation where
his children were baptized, Obama asked colleagues to take religion
seriously while simultaneously demanding that people of faith dumb
down their vocabularies so as to be less irritating or
incomprehensible to nonbelievers.
Obama’s Cheshire Cat defense of actions like these makes his
playbook easy to parody. Let me just say, for example, that in
spite of the manifestly furry and meowing evidence to the contrary,
I do not own cats and never did. The felines in the O’Hannigan
household either belong to my wife and children, or simply choose
to live with us. We address them as “Walter” and “Pikabu” as a mark
of esteem rather than ownership. Certainly we can no more disown
Walter and Pikabu than we can disown the dogs with which they share
space, but “disown” is obviously a figure of speech, although there
are those who will try to tell you differently.
If any family pet should require expensive medical care, then we
never had this conversation.
Challenge that assertion, and I (in Obama Mode) will examine
your challenge for racism or outmoded thinking. (I’d offer a more
comprehensive exam, but Hillary Clinton took the stethoscope that
checks for sexism, and doesn’t want to give it back). Following a
superficial but smooth review conducted exclusively through
polished rhetoric, I will then invite you to support me in the name
of responsible change.
Patrick O’Hannigan writes from North
Carolina.
