Inside this week's New Yorker
Posted: Monday, July 14, 2008 10:20 AM by Mark Murray
From NBC's Mark Murray
While the New Yorker's provocative cover is getting all the attention, it's worth mentioning two insightful pieces inside it. Ryan Lizza, in a lengthy profile, traces Obama's evolution as a politician in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics. "Obama likes to discuss his unusual childhood ... and the three years in the nineteen-eighties when he worked as a community organizer in Chicago... But his life in Chicago from 1991 until his victorious Senate campaign is a lacuna in his autobiography. It is also the period that formed him as a politician. Some Obama supporters professed shock when, recently, he abandoned a pledge to stay within the public campaign-finance system if [McCain] agreed to do the same. Preckwinkle’s concern about Obama—that he is a pure political animal—suddenly became more widespread; commentators abruptly stopped using the words 'callow' and 'naïve.'"
VIDEO: Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor for The New Yorker, defends the cover of the magazine, a drawing of Barack Obama with a turban on his head, his wife holding a gun, a flag on fire and Osama bin Laden's picture on the wall.
Meanwhile, the
New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg examines all the attention Obama's apparent flip-flops have received, and he argues that much of the coverage is trivial. "Obama, it turns out, is a politician. In this respect, he resembles the forty-three Presidents he hopes to succeed, from the Father of His Country to the wayward son, Alpha George to Omega George. Winning a Presidential election doesn’t require being all things to all of the people all of the time, but it does require being some things to most of the people some of the time. It doesn’t require saying one thing and also saying its opposite, but it does require saying more or less the same thing in ways that are understood in different ways."
Hertzberg also breaks down the flip-flops. He calls the one on Iraq a "marginal tweak"; says the charge of flip-flopping on abortion is "nonexistent;" contends that his change on the Supreme Court's 2nd Amendment decision is a "substantive tweak"; and notes that the FISA and campaign-finance U-turns are significant. He concludes: "Meanwhile, McCain has been busily reversing his views in highly consequential ways. He opposed the Bush tax cuts because they favored the rich; now he supports their eternal extension. He was against offshore oil drilling as not being worth the environmental damage it brings; now he’s for it, and damn the costs. He was against torture, period; now he’s against it unless the C.I.A. does it. He keeps flipping to the wrong flops."
"But he and Obama can both take comfort in what they’re avoiding. If they were clinging to every past position, the flip-flop police would be busting them for stubbornness and rigidity in the face of changing circumstances. Bush all over again! Flip-flops are preferable to cement shoes, especially in summertime."
