Barack Obama learned an important lesson from John Kerry's 2004 Presidential campaign--do not express two contradictory positions in the same sentence. Instead, wait awhile.
Kerry infamously contended in a single statement that he had voted for funding for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan before he voted against the funding.
Conversely, Obama has smartly spread out his flip-flops. During the primary, Obama asserted that qualification for the Presidency should be measured primarily on the basis of one's judgment not their experience.
During the primary, we were told by Obama that Washington was broken and that Washington insiders were the problem.
During the primary, we were invited to feast on the munificence of Obama's fierce urgency for a new kind of politics marinated in the special sauce of his uplifting rhetoric.
And then on Saturday, it turned out that experience does matter; that being a Washington insider for 35 years is not such a bad thing; and that the trite class envy political rhetoric of the Left should indeed be central to this campaign.
It turned out that those things are also more important than one's personal judgment particularly relative to their public integrity, as Obama's running mate has a troubling tendency of confusing the work and words of others for his own.
Just as we are entering the homestretch of this possibly historic and probably transformational campaign (so we were told), it turns out that Obama is just another craven politician.
Thus, the spectacle of Obama, the great consensus-builder, gleefully presiding over Hacksaw Joe Biden's formulaic pillorying of McCain during what passed for his acceptance speech as Obama's vice presidential nominee on Saturday in Springfield.
"Ladies and gentlemen, your kitchen table is like mine," said Biden. "You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's not a worry John McCain has to worry about. It's a pretty hard experience. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at."
Obama and Biden are apparently living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Obama speaks of hope and employs cynicism. Obama speaks of judgment and he abides the lack of it. Obama fancies himself transcendental and yet, other than the telegenic physical packaging, remains mired in the failed conventions of big government liberalism.
So then if Obama doesn't believe his own rhetoric, why should we?
