Redstate

I don't think that you could pull it off anyway.

By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Bill Clinton | Obamafiles | Welfare Reform — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

By all accounts, former President Clinton was and is one of those people who, five minutes after you've met him, you wonder why on earth you were ever infuriated with the man in the first place*. You seem to have a more, ah, ethereal charm.

Anyway, let's discuss welfare reform. You put up a nice little ad (H/T: Hot Air) where you talked about dignity, work, so on, so forth; and in the process, you had your people do a nice little rhetorical whirl that suggested that the legislation you signed reduced welfare rolls by 80%. A little fib, that, but we'll tentatively allow it for right now. At least you're pleased that the rolls were cut.

Yeah. About that.

ABC News' Teddy Davis and Gregory Wallace Report: 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." Obama leaves out, however, that he was against the 1996 federal legislation which precipitated the caseload reduction.

"I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare," Obama said on the floor of the Illinois state Senate on May 31, 1997. "Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems."

Oops.

Read on.

I think that your media honeymoon is pretty much over, Senator. At least from ABC. From the article:

The shift in Obama's rhetoric on welfare reform has proceeded in stages. When 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.

Read the whole thing: particularly the comments section, which has some people in it who are highly upset that ABC didn't do the usual "ejaculating roses" piece on Obama. The article notes that Obama studiously avoided discussing this topic while the primaries were still going on. Contra ABC's own assumptions, I could very easily see this as being merely Obama's desire to avoid giving credit to Bill Clinton, who is after all married to the person who Obama was competing with in the primaries. Either way, when ABC writes "But by undergoing this transformation only once it became politically convenient, Obama’s critics will charge that he puts calculation ahead of conviction" - yeah, on that they're on the money.

Now, this will probably get overlooked, what with Obama's simultaneous break to the left on gay marriage and new pander on faith-based initiative programs: between the two of those, that's most of the blogosphere primed to go in swinging. Besides, welfare reform is one of those fights that the Right won so thoroughly that mainstream America forgets that there was a fight to begin with. No real surprise that Obama might quietly slink into a position where he could look like he was for it all along: after all, that's hardly atypical behavior for a politician. So what's my point, then? I guess that I don't have much of one: except that hey, nice feet you have there, Senator. When are you going to put them in the kiln?

Which last is really just a rephrase of the title, if you think about it.

Moe Lane

*Bush isn't too bad at that, either. Again, I'm not saying this from personal experience.