Barack Obama: Stuck on Stupid and in Reverse

How fast can Barack Obama backtrack on every one of the liberal positions he used to win the nomination? Pretty darn fast:

Barack Obama battled charges that he was reinventing his plan for withdrawal from Iraq Thursday, carving out a nuanced military policy after saying earlier in the day that he might “refine” his Iraq approach.

The earlier statement was widely interpreted as a willingness to revise his long-stated plan to withdraw all brigades within 16 months of taking office, and opened him up to Republican attacks.

But the backlash led Obama to call a second press conference in Fargo, N.D., where the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said he was not talking about refining his 16-month timetable.




“I have not equivocated on that position, I am not searching for maneuvering room with respect to that position ,” he said. “I’m just puzzled …I think what’s happened is that the (John) McCain campaign primed the pump with the press to suggest that somehow we were changing our policy when we haven’t, and that just hasn’t been the case.”

GOP criticism Thursday initially came from the Republican National Committee, which in a statement said: “There appears to be no issue that Barack Obama is not willing to reverse himself on for the sake of political expedience.”

But his second press conference touched off a new round of recriminations.

The RNC repeated its charge, and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said Obama has “reversed” his position.

“Now that Barack Obama has changed course and proven his past positions to be just empty words, we would like to congratulate him for accepting John McCain’s principled stand on this critical national security issue. If he had visited Iraq sooner or actually had a one-on-one meeting with General Petraeus, he would have changed his position long ago,” Rogers said in a statement.

Obama seemed to struggle Thursday in explaining how his upcoming trip to Iraq might refine, but not basically alter, his promise to quickly remove U.S. combat troops from the war.

It's pretty funny to watch the avidly pro-Obama blogs as they scramble to rationalize Obama's various cave-ins on liberal issues. Those poor people don't know what's hit them.

In reality, Obama was stupid to ever place a timeline on an Iraq pullout without fully understanding the situation on the ground or talking to the commanders. He did so only to appease the lefties and win their votes. Now that he's got them, he can afford to play with their emotions a bit.