Obama's Excellent Adventure

The latest hot topic on the campaign trail concerns Barack Obama's rush to the political center on a variety of important issues. Indeed he's moved so far to the right since clinching the Democratic nomination, he's nearly closer to President Bush on some issues than McCain!

World-class syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hanson, in his latest column, describes the various recent ways Obama has buddied-up to George W. Bush. Here's a few:

• Obama supported the recent Supreme Court gun rights decision.
• He has recently revised and restricted the circumstances in which he believes abortion should be legal.
• He supports the much-maligned Office of Faith Based Initiatives that Bush set up in his first term.
• He's backtracked on his demands for renegotiating NAFTA.
• He supports immunity for telecommunication companies who "spied" on Americans following 9/11.
• He told the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."
• He called Iran a "grave threat."

Read the column. Amazing.

Of course, Obama's biggest flip-flop is already in the works. He'll travel to Iraq this summer to meet our commanders there, and evaluate the progress we've made since the implementation of General Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy. Realizing the success of the "surge," and recognizing the political folly of abandoning Iraq just as we're winning there (as we are), Obama will "reevaluate" his Iraq policy. In the ultimate slap in the face to his rabidly anti-war base, Obama will keep troops in Iraq until Petraeus tells him the Iraqi government can sustain itself without our help. Obama's alternative is to publicly overrule General Petraeus, and pull out the troops in spite of the collapse into chaos that would almost certainly result from such an action.