Mother Davis pulls up to a parking meter, opens her purse, and comments,

It was bad enough that Barack Obama decided to ruin his reputation as an agent of change by using the politics-as-usual tactic of tilting to the right after winning his party’s presidential nomination. What has made it worse for Obama over the last couple of weeks is that he did such a clumsy job at it.

Obama supported George W. Bush’s FISA Amendments Act, a nasty proposed law that would allow huge, unsupervised electronic spying programs by the government against the American people. Then he promised to expand, rather than ending, George W. Bush’s “faith-based” religious patronage system to use government money to encourage churches to get involved in electoral politics. To top it off, Obama suggested that he might not work so hard to get the United States out of Iraq after all.

The idea behind these big policy shifts is that Barack Obama had secured the support of the Democratic Party, and so he needed to go after independent and Republican swing voters. The trouble was that Obama had not really secured the support of his Democratic base yet. Obama just presumed that Democrats would follow him no matter what he did, even if he started acting like a Republican.

The results of a new CNN poll show the pathetic results: The number of former supporters of Hillary Clinton who now support Barack Obama is down from one month ago.

These ex-Clinton supporters are not, for the most part, going to John McCain either. The number of former Hillary Clinton supporters who support McCain is down too.

Hillary Clinton’s former supporters are essential to Barack Obama’s victory, but he is losing them because they wanted precisely what Obama refused to offer: A progressive campaign. These Democrats don’t want to support a Republican like John McCain, but they don’t want to support a Democrat with right wing tendencies such as Obama has become over the last two weeks.

Just when these Democrats needed Barack Obama to demonstrate that they could trust him, he did exactly the opposite. Obama proved that he couldn’t be trusted by Democrats, by betraying the Democratic principles he had been promising to uphold.

Barack Obama took the Democratic vote for granted before he truly had it secured. This miscalculation easily qualifies as the most stupid maneuver of the 2008 presidential election. If Obama loses the 2008 election, it will be this move that makes the defeat possible.

The aides who put this fractured triangulation together need to be fired from the Obama campaign, and the damage needs to be repaired with a complete and honest apology from Obama himself.

I don’t expect these changes to take place, though, because Barack Obama still doesn’t get it. Obama still doesn’t seem to understand the breadth and depth of Democratic anger at his embrace of the worst of George W. Bush’s politics.

Obama still seems to think that he can paper over any problem by giving a speech using a pretty voice and a lot of empty promises.

Still unable to find that change she was looking for,
Mother Davis