Obama flip-flop on commissions

posted at 10:40 am on September 18, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Yesterday, Barack Obama dismissed a suggestion from John McCain to form a bipartisan commission on the credit-sector meltdown.  He scoffed at the idea, calling it Washington-speak for “We’ll get back to ya.”  Fox News took a look at Obama’s own record on commissions and pointed out that Obama has publicly called for several such panels, including one for American war crimes in Iraq and a monitor for “bipartisanship” in Washington:

I’m no big fan of commissions, either. They sound reasonable but usually come up with the kind of compromises that solve nothing but look great. They don’t replace real leadership, and tend to create more problems when people give them more deference than any committee deserves. The 9/11 Commission is a great example of this; instead of streamlining our intelligence efforts, it slapped two layers of bureaucracy on top of the crazy-quilt of agencies, putting decision-makers further away from the raw data and exacerbating the conflicts between groups.

Obama, though, has a track record of a knee-jerk call to form them.  As Fox points out and as Francis Beckwith documents, Obama has called for exactly the same kind of panels for:

• Social Security (November 2007)
• Torture (September 2007)
• War crimes (August 2008)
• Wall Street (April 2008)

So let’s get this straight.  Obama called for a bipartisan commission on Wall Street oversight five months ago.  John McCain now agrees with that suggestion.  After McCain agrees, Obama says it’s nothing more than a political dodge?  That’s far worse than John Kerry’s famous flip-flop on the $87 billion in war funding in 2004; it’s an admission that Obama was never serious in the first place.

Thanks for the clarification, Senator Obama.  We’ll get back to ya.

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