Barack Obama hasn’t been doing too many prime-time interviews lately, so it was at least somewhat newsworthy to see him sit down with CNN’s Larry King and Gwen Ifill of PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” last night.
This exchange from the latter interview seems to have drawn quite a bit of attention.
MS. IFILL: That’s a final question, just to – I want you to think a little bit about the stage that you’re at in your campaign. You have 26 percent of people still think you were raised a Muslim. People look at your shifts on issues, from warrantless surveillance to gun control, and they say, who is this guy? What does he believe? How do you begin to, in this stage in your campaign, tell people who you are and have it stick?
SEN. OBAMA: Well, first of all, I do think that this notion that somehow we’ve had wild shifts in my positions is simply inaccurate. You mentioned the gun position. I’ve been talking about the Second Amendment being an individual right for the last year and a half. So there wasn’t a shift there.
MS. IFILL: Campaign finance?
SEN. OBAMA: Well, campaign finance, there’s no doubt that that was a shift in recognizing that we could not broker a deal with the Republicans that would prevent the Republican National Committee or the Republican Governors Association or all these other organizations, that are already spending millions of dollars against us, that we could not contain them within a public financing system. So the broader point, Gwen, is if you compare sort of my shift in emphasis on issues that I’ve been proposing for years, like say, faith-based initiatives, which have raised questions in the press, if you compare that to John McCain –
MS. IFILL: And raised hackles among some of your supporters.
SEN. OBAMA: Well, raised hackles amongst some in the blogosphere, if you compare that to John McCain’s complete reversal on oil drilling, complete reversal on George Bush’s tax cuts, complete reversal on immigration where he said he wouldn’t even vote for his own bill, that I think is a pretty hard case to make that somehow I’ve been shifting substantially relative to John McCain.
I think that’s substantively and politically the right move here. Ifill approached the issue as if it were a given that Obama keeps changing policy positions. But that’s absurd — Obama switched on public financing and voted for the FISA “compromise.” John McCain, meanwhile, has reversed course on literally dozens of issues and policies.
There’s a false equivalency here.
It reminds me of a couple of years ago, when a slew of Republican members of Congress were either indicted, convicted, under investigation, or some combination thereof. Then, Rep. William “Cash in the Freezer” Jefferson (D-La.) got caught, and the immediate reaction is that corruption in DC must be “a bipartisan problem.” Twelve Republicans on one side, one Democrat on the other, and it’s a crisis afflicting “both parties.”
The same seems largely true here. Did Obama reverse course on public financing and FISA? He sure did. Are two reversals roughly equivalent to five dozen? I don’t think so.
And what about Obama’s “shift in emphasis on issues”? This got huge play in some corners, but it seems like a pretty innocuous concession. When candidates transition from the primaries to the general election, there’s bound to be a “shift in emphasis” — the campaign is talking to a broader group of voters. Changing ones “emphasis” is not the same as changing ones “positions.” Obama’s beliefs, positions, and priorities have remained largely intact, making a “shift in emphasis” largely a rhetorical issue.
As for the Larry King interview, there was a fair amount of discussion about the cover of the New Yorker, but this exchange stood out.
KING: Considering that, though, there’s a lot of e-mails going around. It gets rather terrible. A “Newsweek” poll shows that 12 percent of America believes that you’re a Muslim and 26 believe — 26 percent believe you were raised in a Muslim home — a lot of misinformation.
How do you fight that?
OBAMA: Well, you know, by getting on LARRY KING and telling everybody I’m a Christian and I wasn’t raised in a Muslim home and I pledge allegiance to the flag and, you know, all the things that have been reported in these e-mails are completely untrue and have been debunked again and again and again. So, hey, all you can do is just tell the truth and trust in the American people that, over time, they’re going to know what the truth is.
One last point I want to — I do want to make about these e- mails, though. And I think this has an impact on this “New Yorker” cover. You know, this is actually an insult against Muslim-Americans, something that we don’t spend a lot of time talking about. And sometimes I’ve been derelict in pointing that out.
You know, there are wonderful Muslim-Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things. And for this to be used as sort of an insult or to raise suspicions about me I think is unfortunate. And it’s not what America is all about.
The campaign’s drive to explain that Obama is not a secret Muslim has left some actual Muslims feeling slighted. Obama’s comments to King seemed to address this head-on.
Did anyone else watch the interviews? Anything jump out at you?