“In the primary, Mr. Obama:

• supported pulling out of Iraq within 16 months,
• called the D.C. gun ban constitutional,
• backed the subjection of telecom companies to expensive lawsuits for cooperating in the terror surveillance program,
• opposed welfare reform,
• pledged to renegotiate Nafta,
• disavowed free trade and
• was strongly against the death penalty in all cases.

“But in the past few weeks, Mr. Obama has reversed course on all of these, discarding fringe liberal views for relentlessly centrist positions. He also flip-flopped on accepting public financing and condemning negative ads from third party groups, like unions.

“By taking Nixon’s advice, Mr. Obama is assuming such dramatic reversals will somehow avoid voter scrutiny. But people are watching closely, and by setting a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions, Mr. Obama may be risking his reputation for truthfulness. A candidate’s credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built.”

The above excerpt is from today’s Wall Street Journal.

The bullet points were added to emphasize the number of 180-degree reversals.

Moving towards the center is one thing. Displaying no adherence to principles is another.

As Medusa notes, this is very unsettling to Obama’s most passionate supporters, many of whom are protesting on his own Web site.

Speaking of Obama’s campaign Web site:

Change & Experience blog linked to a story here the other day, and displayed an astonishing trend graph that shows that Obama’s popularity indeed is on the wane:

NoQuarter is reporting that Daily Kos and Barack Obama’s base is fracturing. He couldn’t be more right. Right now BarackObama.com is tanking in website hits. He is currently at pre-Iowa caucus levels (currently at around Jan. 2nd). John McCain’s site and Bob Barr’s site have remain constant. Barack Obama’s polling numbers have remained unchanged since May 18th. For a “popular” presumptive candidate, you would think you would see his numbers increasing.

I don’t think it’s helpful to refer to a presidential candidate as a liar. I will not refer to Obama as a liar. That kind of talk lowers the civic discourse, it impugns the name of a public servant, and distracts us from the important duty of selecting a president. So, please ignore the image above.

However, since we happen to be on the subject of veracity, it’s come to my attention that Mr. Obama is now running an advertisement, titled “Dignity,” in which he claims to have passed welfare reform legislation. ABC News reports:

Barack Obama aligned himself with welfare reform on Monday, launching a television ad which touts the way the overhaul “slashed the rolls by 80 percent.”

Here’s an image from the ad:

However, as you may have guessed, Obama is not telling the whole story, or even part of it. Obama was opposed to President Clinton’s historic welfare reform plan:

When former President Bill Clinton was poised to sign welfare reform while running for re-election in 1996, Obama called it “disturbing.” A decade later, as an underdog running for president against Clinton’s wife, he spent 2007 avoiding the subject. By the time Obama emerged as the Democratic frontrunner in the spring of 2008, he began leaving the impression that he was for it all along.

In another example of his bizarre habit of trashing President Clinton, Obama said

“I’m not going to re-litigate what happened back in the 90s,” said Obama at a July 17, 2007, press conference in Washington, D.C. “I’m talking about what’s going to be happening going forward.”

Yet in the 1990s, Obama couldn’t hide his disdain for the only Democrat elected to a second term since 1936:

During a 1996 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Obama could not conceal his disappointment in his fellow Democrat. “Bill Clinton? Well, his campaign’s fascinating to a student of politics. It’s disturbing to someone who cares about certain issues. But politically, it seems to be working,” said Obama.

And:

And on May 31, 1997 Obama said on the floor of the Illinois state Senate, “I probably would not have supported the federal legislation.”

During this primary campaign, Obama avoided the issue:

While campaigning for president in 2007, Obama refused on two occasions to say if he would have signed the same welfare-reform bill approved by the husband of his top rival.

As he looks to square-off against John McCain, a man famous for heroism and fighting government waste, Barack Obama is attempting to signal to the country that he too is a moderate Democrat, a Third Way progressive in the tradition of Bill Clinton.

What Barack Obama fails to mention in his ad, in contrast to John McCain, is that he has surrounded himself with people who have disdain for the United States — Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright — friendships that do not signal a modern form of liberalism but are remnants of the stale and hateful anti-American Left, a type of thinking which unfortunately seems to be resurgent.

NancyA, in a piece in these pages about Obama’s long-standing ties with the socialist reform group ACORN, shows that welfare reform is the last thing Obama and his allies would support. Indeed, ACORN’s

national goals are municipal “living” wage laws, targeting big companies like Costco, rolling back welfare reform, and regulating banks.

Obama conducted trainings for ACORN, did work for them while he was practicing law, and actively sought their endorsement for president. This is an organization that:

drives companies like Costco from urban areas that actually need jobs. Their opposition to welfare reform tends to keep the people in poverty in these areas, while causing family breakdown. The worst of their tactics is the regulation of banks. They protest “predatory lending,” putting pressure on banks to make large donations to them to finance their “non-partisan motor voter drives.” Stern says that these tactics tend to be “undisguised authoritarian socialism.”

Barack Obama held a consistent position from 1995 until June 2008. He was against welfare reform. His hostility to the Clinton administration has always been something of a puzzle for those of use who celebrated the modernizing of our Party and the victories which ensued.

The Progressive Policy Institute, the policy arm of the much-maligned DLC, issued the following statement, one I could never see Obama sincerely supporting:

The Third Way approach to economic opportunity and security stresses technological innovation, competitive enterprise, and education rather than top- down redistribution or laissez faire. On questions of values, it embraces “tolerant traditionalism,” honoring traditional moral and family values while resisting attempts to impose them on others. It favors an enabling rather than a bureaucratic government, expanding choices for citizens, using market means to achieve public ends and encouraging civic and community institutions to play a larger role in public life. The Third Way works to build inclusive, multiethnic societies based on common allegiance to democratic values.

Makes sense to me.

The neo-liberals have made it clear that their enemy, perhaps even more than the Republicans (witness Joe Lieberman), is the Third Way progressive. Their unrelenting attacks and race-baiting of Hillary was an attempt to expel any vestiges of Third Way progressivism from the Party, even though Hillary was the more progressive candidate on health care and other issues of substance; she was just too closely associated to the Clinton administration.

Barack Obama carefully crafted his pitch to the neo-liberals by criticizing the Clinton administration. “I am one of you,” he was telegraphing, the implied message being a rejection of Clinton’s center-left, moderate, market-based approach to poverty and inequality.

But now that he faces a man who speaks the Straight Talk lingo of government reform, Obama is suddenly a reformer himself. It’s a transparently political and opportunistic move, and it adds to the narrative that Obama cannot be trusted and that he lacks candor.

[For more on Obama's changing positions, see Part I of "Obama's Two Faces and Forked Tongue" linked here]