Change you can disavow
When Barack Obama speaks (incessantly) about change, he probably doesn’t mean changing his positions to suit his audience. Yet this is becoming the change Obama is best at. Earlier today, I noted that, while Obama promises Ohio voters to renegotiate NAFTA, his "lead" economic adviser assures Canadian officials that this is just campaign rhetoric.
Meanwhile, Obama, again through a surrogate, is signaling a change in his position with respect to meeting with Iranian president Ahmadinejad. Thus, Rep. Robert Wexler, Obama’s main Jewish outreach guy, has told JTA that Obama does not necessarily have Ahmadinejad in mind when he says he will meet with Iran's leaders. Wexler (most recently seen providing misleading information to the Jerusalem Post about the role of Robert Malley in the Obama campaign), says that “Ahmadinejad may not be the one to meet with" because “he is not the person that ultimately controls power in Iran." Maybe Obama will be like the guy in the old 1960s joke who arrives on Mars and says, “take me to your leader.”
But as recently as November, Obama was pretty clear that he would talk to Ahmadinejad even though the Holocaust denier might not have ultimate power. According to JTA, Obama told Meet the Press:
"Look, part of the reason it’s important for us to talk to countries we don’t like and leaders we don’t like, it's not that I think that in a conversation with somebody like Ahmadinejad that I’m going to somehow change his mind on everything, but what we do is, we send a signal to other leadership in Iran, to the Iranian people and to the world community that we are listening and that we are willing to try to resolve conflicts peacefully."
So Obama’s new position (as explained by Wexler) isn’t based on a new understanding of the Iranian power structure. It is based, almost surely, on the need to assuage the concerns of pro-Israel voters in the Democratic base.
