No time for Obama to play it safe
Barack Obama, elegant practitioner of political pragmatism, sounded passionless last week talking about guns. His careful tiptoeing after the Supreme Court's landmark decision overthrowing a Washington, D.C., handgun ban gave Republican John McCain the opening his wobbling campaign has been aching for.
While Obama parsed, McCain bellowed.
Obama: "I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through commonsense, effective safety measures."
Translation: I'm leading McCain in moderate swing states and looking soft on guns will mess that up.
McCain: "Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today's ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right to free speech and assembly."
Translation: Hallelujah! I finally have a way to whale on the wunderkind!
Obama has risen like a rocket through this election season because he has looked, sounded and operated differently. But in the last two weeks, he has lost altitude as he gets closer and closer to taking possession of the real presidential seal, not just the embarrassing facsimile launched by his overconfident staff.
A pattern is becoming clear.
Campaign spending limits: Obama was for them until he was against them. The avalanche of money that has landed in his campaign coffers has caused him to now realize that campaign finance system is broken. And he now promises to fix it -- but only after meeting with Hillary Clinton's moneybags donors and after he gets elected.
NAFTA: Turns out his earlier expressions of opposition were "overheated." More conciliatory vocabulary is now employed about Canada and Mexico.
Death penalty reform: Supreme Court conservatives, in the minority last week, argued it's OK to execute child rapists. Obama, the Illinois death penalty reformer, sees their point.
Warrantless wiretaps: They're suddenly not looking so bad.
Flag pins: Looking better.
As McCain has amply demonstrated by his regular support of Bush administration policies, self-proclaimed mavericks sometimes talk straighter than they walk.
But the cynical fact is that Americans get more worked up about being allowed to keep a handgun under their pillow than about sending billions of dollars and thousands of lives down the sinkhole of Iraq. And so this latest Supreme Court ruling ratchets up the emotion that McCain has thus far failed to drum up for his candidacy.
Mayor Daley may not be big on elocution but he certainly knows how to communicate his passion about kids being gunned down and maimed in neighborhoods just a stone's throw from Obama's Hyde Park home.
It's time for Obama to stop yapping about being a community activist and go back to acting like one. This nation is awash in guns. And despite the Supreme Court majority's myopic notion of the Second Amendment and its Revolutionary War rhetoric of "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state," the only militias in our streets today are run by drug-dealing gang-bangers.
While it's fair to question just how successful handgun bans have been in reducing the murder rate -- which has spiked 13 percent in Chicago this year -- it's also critical to engage in a bold dialogue about this country's obsession with its guns.
If not gun bans, then what? If not now, when?
Barack Obama is a different kind of candidate, with a capacity to move this nation as it hasn't been moved in years. But with every carefully calibrated statement he makes, the less moved we may be, and the less different he may become.