Barack Obama Gets People Mad At Him (Part III)
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Hypocrisy | Public Financing Of Election Campaigns — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I don't doubt for a moment that the media remains largely in the tank for Barack Obama. But despite--or perhaps, because of--that fact, the Obama campaign's decision to opt out of public financing has earned him nothing but scorn from the editorial pages:
For most voters, Barack Obama's shift away from public financing is not as big a deal as the mounting death toll in Iraq, surging gas prices -- or even what they're going to make for dinner tonight.
But Obama's announcement Thursday that he would become the first candidate to opt out of the public financing program for the general election was a big deal for some of the nation's most influential newspaper editorial boards, which have long been ardent champions of campaign finance reform and which had thought they'd found a kindred spirit on the issue.
Friday morning, scathing editorials in many top broadsheets characterized Obama's move as a self-interested flip-flop, dismissed his efforts to cast it as a principled stand and charged that Obama wasn't living up to the reformer image around which he has crafted his political identity.
To which, my reply is "Where there's smoke . . ." well, you can fill in the rest. Suffice it to say that given his utterly conventional politics, his decision to opt out of public financing--which he had praised in the past, by the way--and his embrace of the FISA compromise despite the anger that it has caused amongst his base (an embrace that is meant purely and completely to try to blunt attacks on Obama's national security record and has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama's supposed beliefs concerning this issue), what we are increasingly seeing is that Barack Obama, far from being a breath of fresh air, is an entirely ordinary politician.
Which is fine, by the way. Many of us have learned to expect nothing more than ordinariness from our political class. But Obama should never have advertised himself as being something different than what he actually is.