Beep, beep, beep...

...and that sound you hear is that of Barack Obama backpedaling on his ideas regarding meeting foreign leaders with no preconditions:

"With his experience and leadership credentials under sharp criticism, Senator Barack Obama and his advisers are trying to clarify what has emerged as a central tenet of his proposed foreign policy: a willingness to meet leaders of enemy nations. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, sought to emphasize, as he and his aides have done continually over the last few days, the difference between avoiding preconditions for talks with nations like Iran and Syria, and granting them automatic discussions at the presidential level. While Mr. Obama has said he would depart from the Bush administration policy of refusing to meet with certain nations unless they meet preconditions, he has also said he would reserve the right to choose which leaders he would meet, should he choose to meet with them at all."

Obama isn't stupid. He knows his position on this hasn't held up too well. And it hasn't held up too well because the criticisms of it, coming from a conservative direction, have hit home. This is a victory for the Right, and they should keep pounding away on this.

Obama: the Teflon candidate?

His comments about "bitter" small-town, rural folks "clinging" ignorantly to God and guns so far haven't seemed to hurt him. Superdelegates from states about to vote don't see it as a big deal.
Recent polls indicate he's gaining in states like Indiana and North Carolina.

But we haven't seen the last of this issue.
Republicans in the fall will surely try to make hay out of Obama's elitist, rather arrogant comments.

Taking on Barack Obama

Michael Gerson here gets it right: Republican/conservative criticism of candidate Obama must be carefully-thought-out:

"Barack Obama will not be defeated by taunts about his middle name, which gain his juvenile persecutors all the sympathy of a schoolyard bully. He will not be defeated by sinister interpretations of his hypnotic popularity -- people generally (and unsurprisingly) are attracted to the handsome, genial and eloquent. And in a change election, Obama will not be defeated because he seems inexperienced -- his freshness is actually a qualification."

He won't be defeated by simply calling him a liberal or leftist, either.
But read Gerson's entire piece: what he does is to go on to show how Obama's campaign pledge to meet "without preconditions" with dictators such as Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could turn out to be disastrous decisions, and could boomerang decisively against the national security interests of the United States. Principled conservative candidates can easily, and successfully, point these kinds of things out.

But such conservatives must be principled, and consistent, themselves.

The Kingdom of Obama

Barack Obama, yesterday: "I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."
Hmmm. Isn't creating the kingdom the job of the Man Upstairs?

A fundamental difference between conservatives and non-conservatives is that the Right knows that the heavenly kingdom can never be created on earth. It's good that Senator Obama reminds us of that (unintentionally).