Enigmatic Obama frustrates foes and fans

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By David Broder | Monday, July 14, 2008 9:26 PM CDT | () comments

WASHINGTON — John McCain is the candidate who actually had experience as a wartime flyer, but Barack Obama is the one who has most successfully adapted a favorite tactic of those intrepid aviators. When the pilots were over a target heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns, they would release a cloud of fine metal scraps, hoping to confuse the aim of the shells or missiles being fired in their direction.

In the weeks since he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, the Illinois senator has done a similar trick, throwing out verbal hints of altered positions on any number of issues.

In their effort to embarrass him, Republicans ask: Who is the real Barack Obama? Is he, as he claims, a fresh face, heralding a new era of post-partisan politics, or a cynical old-style politician making poll-driven adjustments with scant regard for principles? Is he a doctrinaire liberal, disguising himself as a late-blooming centrist?

Last week, the Republican National Committee, in a statement cataloguing some half-dozen recent Obama “flip-flops,” threw up its hands without offering answers. The McCain campaign issued its own list of Obama’s changed positions totaling 17 items, but confessed that “nobody knows what Barack Obama truly believes.”

Candidates often change their emphasis, if not their basic positions, once they shift from running against others in their own party primaries and start thinking about a general election with millions more voters of all ideologies poised to weigh in. McCain has done some of that himself, most notably in the week when he campaigned in the traditionally Democratic territories of New Orleans, Selma, Ala., and Appalachia.

But Obama’s case is more challenging than the typical candidate’s post-primary adjustment. For one thing, he is more opaque than the usual nominee. No one in recent decades has emerged as the party standard-bearer from so truncated a political career: four years in the United States Senate, during which he has yet to lead on any major domestic or foreign policy issue, preceded by largely anonymous service in the Illinois state Senate.

He won by convincing a narrow majority of Democratic voters that he could mobilize otherwise distrustful and alienated citizens with his promise to change Washington and to introduce a more open and less partisan brand of politics.

Few if any of those inclined to support him have been so deeply offended by his readiness to “refine” his pledge to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq in 16 months or his opting out of the public finance system he had once pledged to use.

Obama is making it hard for the Republicans to figure out how to attack him. The risk for him is if he also frustrates those voters’ need to understand what makes him tick. They don’t elect enigmas to the Oval Office.

Contact David Broder at davidbroder@washpost.com