Even amateur politicians should know this: if you’re going to take a public position on a controversial topic, either take it or don’t.  Don’t take the position one day and then claim you didn’t a day later.  Barack Obama decided to use a Ramadan speech to take a position on the Ground Zero mosque on Friday, and by Saturday, even his own staff was disowning it:

President Barack Obama’s decision to make public comments Friday that further stoked an already-brewing controversy over the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero was “purely” his own, an administration official said Saturday.

And then, Obama started backpedaling:

Obama clarifies slightly on NY mosque comments. “Wasn’t commenting on wisdom…of putting a mosque there” just “the right” to do so

The official story was that there was nothing inconsistent about Obama’s blasting critics of the GZ mosque and then declaring that he wouldn’t endorse the “wisdom” of the project. And then he tried to pull back the pullback:

But most mosque opponents concede the Muslim group’s legal right to place the mosque in the planned site. They just argue that it’s a terrible idea and have appealed to the organizers to cancel the project. At the iftar dinner, Obama cast his vote with the mosque builders. And then he pulled back.

And then he had his spokesman pull back the pullback. “Just to be clear, the president is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night,” the White House’s Bill Burton said Saturday. “It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project. But it is his responsibility to stand up for the Constitutional principle of religious freedom and equal treatment for all Americans. What he said last night, and reaffirmed today, is that if a church, a synagogue or a Hindu temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to those who want to build a mosque.”

Now, there is simply no doubt that Obama’s Friday evening speech, in the context in which it was delivered, was an endorsement of the Ground Zero project. It was certainly widely understood as such. The headlines of the three New York papers reporting the speech were: “Obama Backs Islam Center Near 9/11 Site” (New York Times); “Allah Right By Me” (New York Post); and “Prez: Build the Mosque” (New York Daily News). The lead of an Associated Press report on the speech was: “President Barack Obama on Friday forcefully endorsed building a mosque near ground zero, saying the country’s founding principles demanded no less.” But on Saturday, Obama said all those listeners were wrong, that they misunderstood him.

Several years ago, there was a word for Obama’s rhetorical technique: Clintonian.

Ben Smith at Politico didn’t buy it at all:

Obama’s new stance is logically consistent with his words last night, if a bit less “clarion,” as Mike Bloomberg called the first remarks. And there are certainly two possible stances here: Bloomberg’s, that the Cordoba project itself represents the best of America; and Obama’s, that the freedom of religion is an important American value.

Obama’s new remarks, literally speaking, re-open the question of which side he’s on. Most of the mosque’s foes recognize the legal right to build, and have asked the builders to reconsider.

But the clarification is, in political terms, puzzing [sic]. The signal Obama sent with his rhetoric last night wasn’t that he had chosen to make a trivial, legal point about the First Amendment. He chose to make headlines in support of the mosque project, and he won’t be able to walk them back now with this sprinkling of doubt. All he’ll do is frustrate some of the people who so eagerly welcomed his words yesterday as a return to form.

It’s a return to amateurish stumbling, which Obama hasn’t left at all, but this time it was on a high-profile, emotional issue that no one is going to overlook.

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