Obama the Flip Master

Charles Krauthammer says that St. Barack is unabashedly unprincipled, and in terms of willingness to flip-flop, cut loose old friends and generally do whatever is necessary to win: will make the Clintons "look scrupulous. "

Wow, now that will take some doing. But, why not ?As Mr. Krauthammer reminds us, flip-flopping when and as necessary, cutting loose the baggage and other unpleasantness is not going to have a downside for our soon-to-be Leader:

Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech — designed to rationalize why “I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother” — then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great “race speech” now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.

The media's love is going to be most useful: already has been. Obama has already been able to discard public financing of his campaign -- such blatant disregard of such a big chattering-class shibbolleth would normally draw a lot of unfavorable scrutiny and criticism, particularly since he had earlier pledged to use it. Not so with the Sainted One. Again, Krauthammer:

. . .the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama’s about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a pre-emptive attack on McCain’s 527 independent expenditure groups — notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico’s Jonathan Martin notes, “there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group” and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.

True, Obama’s U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That’s where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.

So what ? Nobody's going to call him on that, or on anything else.

Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Vodkapundit).