Barack Obama reversed his position on FISA reform yesterday, giving the Left a taste of the real Obama for the second time this week.  After Obama abandoned public financing, most of his supporters in the hard-Left base seemed willing to write that off as good politics.  This latest reversal has received a different reaction, as Paul Kane at the Washington Post notes:

In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party’s base since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists. ….

This marks something of a reversal of Obama’s position from an earlier version of the bill, which was approved by the Senate Feb. 12, when Obama was locked in a fight for the Democratic nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Obama missed the February vote on that FISA bill as he campaigned in the “Potomac Primaries,” but issued a statement that day declaring “I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty.”

The wheels of the bus went round and round over Senators Dodd, Feingold, and that same grassroots movement of Americans.  Why?  John McCain has spent the last few weeks hammering Obama on his national-security weaknesses, and Obama’s repeated clinging to the Nuremberg military tribunals as an example of why he opposes military tribunals didn’t help. He needed to show that he can take a nuanced approach to the effort on the war, and he apparently chose FISA as the moment.  It’s sheer political calculus, much the same as Obama’s position on public financing, the death penalty, the Iraq war, and just about every position Obama has taken in this campaign.

It’s becoming clear even  to the Left that Obama has no real firm principles, only ambition.  This FISA package doesn’t differ much from the compromise Senate bill in February — one supported by a significant number of Democrats then — except that it requires a court to certify that telecoms meet the prerequisites for immunity that the first bill granted outright.  As Feingold notes, the bill drafts those requirements to ensure that the applications will be approved, as they should be, since the government assured the telecoms that the activities were legal.   Obama’s stated reason for switching — that it restores FISA and wiretap statutes — was true of the previous version as well.

What changed?  Obama doesn’t need the hard Left to get past Hillary Clinton.  In fact, Code Pink, International ANSWER, and that “grassroots movement”  will become liabilities in a general-election campaign against a nationally-known war hero.   He tossed them under the bus with as much consideration as he did Jeremiah Wright and Jim Johnson.