Doin'The Texas Two-Step

How bad have things gotten for Sen. Barack Obama (since he started his tap dance to the center). So bad that he has started losing the coveted student vote....at least at the University of Florida...

As the economy worsens and the war in Iraq drags on, it’s no wonder that almost 80 percent of Americans believe we’re heading down the “wrong track.”

After eight years of George W. Bush’s ruinous policies, the American people are aching for change. The change we seek isn’t a cosmetic change but a fundamental one. We want our government to start working for us. Most of all, we want our leaders to be honest with us, to give us the “straight talk” that so many politicians pontificate about but always fail to deliver.

Enter Sen. Barack Obama. The junior senator from Illinois swept us off our feet with his electrifying oratory and soaring vision for the country. Back in January, we enthusiastically endorsed Obama because we believed he was the candidate of change. We believed he was a different kind of politician, one who would forsake politics-as-usual and instead value authenticity over focus groups and polls. We believed he could bridge the political schism and cure the color-coded polarization dividing the nation into red and blue states. Most importantly, we took him at his word when he said he would redeploy our troops from Iraq as quickly and safely as possible, thus ending the most egregious foreign policy misadventure in American history since Vietnam.

Since clinching his party’s nomination for president, however, Obama has started to clarify, qualify and triangulate to such a degree that we can hardly recognize him from the inspirational “change” candidate he represented a few short months ago....

Last week, Obama left open the possibility that he would “refine” his position on the redeployment of troops from Iraq, depending on the conditions he encounters on the ground and the advice of military commanders he talks to on his upcoming trip to the war-torn country. To be fair, Obama has not officially announced any change in his plans to withdraw troops from Iraq , but the simple fact that he is allowing himself the wiggle room to do so is depressing, to say the least.

Perhaps Obama isn’t the great change agent we thought he was. Perhaps no one can change the system. Or maybe we expected too much from someone who is, after all, just another politician. Instead of riding a wave of change to the ballot box, we are faced with the age-old “lesser of two evils” paradigm: Perpetual war and inequitable economic policies on the one hand, and spineless triangulation on the other.

It has gotten so bad that the Senator had to go out to a campaign rally to say really - I am a progressive!

POWDER SPRINGS, Ga. — Barack Obama had heard quite enough of the complaints that he is pirouetting, leaping, lurching even, toward the political center.

He is at heart, he told a crowd in suburban Atlanta, a pretty progressive guy who just happens to pack along a complicated world view.

“Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center,” he said. “The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.”

To this, he adds, parenthetically: “And I must say some of this is my friends on the left” and those in the media.

“I am someone who is no doubt progressive,” he said, adding that he believes in universal health care and that government has a strong role to play in overseeing financial institutions and cracking down on abuses in bankruptcies and the like.

His handlers really do need to get control of their candidate. For the longer he talks, the more he looks like just another Chicago politician (which he is) and less and less like the "Agent of Change" that he claims to be.