Centerfield

On the other hand, if his pursuit of negotiations with our enemies is as "aggressive" as his pursuit of an agreement for public campaign financing, that would reassure me. I'm in a bit of a bind, as someone who doesn't like McCain, but who would have to believe that Obama doesn't mean much of what he says in order to actually support him.

I can see two possible reasons to fault the Obama campaign for this.
1) It represents a change of a previous position.
2) It undermines an important position (support for public funding of campaigns).

As regards the first, the only fair thing to do is make a list of all of the positions that both candidates have changed (ever), and compare. Which will be quite a long list, I suspect. Or simply make the intelligent decision that changing a position is not, per se, a problem -- what matters is what the current position is, and maybe the reasoning given for the change.

As for the second, we need to start out by asking: What is the reason for public funding? As I recall, the argument was that it would avoid having candidates who were in debted to the people who could raise large amounts of money for them. (If anyone recalls a different justification, please share. Including if anyone who recalls the argument being made that simply having the government pay for something, anything, is better than private funding.) If that is what we are trying to accomplish, then we need to ask if foregoing public funding going to leave Obama indebted to a few fat cats? Or is he going to end up financed by millions of small donors -- and therefore not "bought" by anyone?

In the latter case, the main difference I can see is that, by passing up public funding all he is doing is reducing the National Debt by the amount that he would otherwise be taking from the Treasury. Of course, those who are unconcerned by the state of the nation's finances won't care about that.

Yeah Josh,

I agree with the latter... I have gone from love him, to swallowing more and more of his political calculations, to believing the things that made me love him to begin with are utterly false. It is almost like you have to ignore anything he has said in the last twelve months to be able to stomach a vote for him. It isn't about playing games to get elected, I can deal with that... It is about pretending you don't play games when in reality you just play them better than everyone else maybe in the history of politics.

I think it is more shameless then that wj. It isn't that Obama changed his mind, it is that he is pretening that he is above all those politicians who make promises and then don't follow through, and I just wish he would stop. This guy is simply more articulate than everybody else, that doesn't make him a saint. He has played coy about this from day one, and then out of the other side of his mouth he has been an advocate for not just the current system, but overhauling the current system with a 100% public financed system, which I happen to support BTW. I can hear the loud laughs coming from Congress once he proposes that idea. It totally undercuts everything he says he is for.

It bugs me, too, thought not enough to make me change my vote, I'd like to think I'd've made the opposite choice in his place and given such a promise already made. I think, given his campaign style, that this choice could hurt him more than the extra cash will help.

Trying to put myself in Obama's shoes a bit, maybe he was paranoid that the 3rd-party GOP $ would be big enough to overcome the public finance $ alot? After all, it HAS been out of control since '92. Then he'd be in the position of having to live with moveon.org being in control of too much of the Dem message. Of course, the (R) stuff probably would be similarly undisciplined, but Bush/Rove clearly DID manage to tame most of their side's 3rd-party actions in both cycles.

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