Obama tells the truth

Every now and then a smart politician crosses people up by telling the truth, and President Obama did so on that infomercial he did with “60 Minutes” on Sunday night.


From Barack Obama: “It doesn’t really matter who the nominee is gonna be. The core philosophy that they’re expressing is the same. And the contrast in visions between where I want to take the country and what– where they say they want to take the country is gonna be stark.”


Whoever the Republicans nominate will have to run the same gauntlet of lies and false accusations from the left that will go unchallenged by anyone in the media.


Pro-abortion women will say the Republican candidate wants to turn the clock back to 1950s and put women back in the kitchen, when they are not getting back-alley abortions.


Civil rights relics will call other Republican proposals Jim Crow laws. The selection seems random, such as the cry of the Wolf of Race over Republican proposals to require voters to show some ID at the polls.


It does not matter who Republicans nominate. The race and sex cards will be played. Conservatives can laugh at how overplayed it all is, but there must be a key vote or two in there, or else the Two Davids — Plouffe and Axelrod — would not bother. Or maybe after 40 years of these turn-back-the-clock routines, liberals do this out of habit. Maybe they have learned no new tricks since 1980 when we saw how this worked to stop Governor Reagan from being elected president.


The knee-jerk turn-back-the-clock campaign has already begun. Via Weasel Zippers:


A Democratic lawmaker said Wednesday on the House floor that Republican legislators around the country are purposefully trying to deny blacks the right to vote by pushing for voter identification laws.


But nope. Kroft asked none of those questions; nor did he press Obama about his views on indefinitely detaining American citizens; nor did he ask about the killing without due process of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American; nor did he ask about the controversy surrounding whether the morning-after pill should be available over-the-counter for people of all ages or not; nor did he ask about the private security contractors that America will pay to stay in Iraq after we leave; nor about the state secrets privilege; nor about aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers; nor about many other issues of concern to liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, all of whom have earnest complaints.


Instead we got hard hitting exchanges like this one:


KROFT: I'm sure your poll numbers will probably automatically go up as soon as there is a Republican candidate in the race. I mean, that's normal. I mean, you're being judged now on your performance.


PRESIDENT OBAMA: No, no, no. I'm being judged against the ideal. And, you know, [Vice President] Joe Biden has a good expression. He says, "Don't judge me against the Almighty, judge me against the alternative."


"Have you given up on the Republicans? Have you stopped reaching out to them? Are you just out there now trying to get your message across?"
"What do you make of this surge by former Speaker Gingrich?"
"Tell me, what do you consider your major accomplishments?"
What this interview represents -- like so many broadcast news interviews with sitting politicians and high level bureaucrats -- is the charade of asking tough questions to hold the president accountable. And the utter failure to ask any actually tough questions, to unearth any new facts of significance, to force any sort of reckoning before the television cameras on a matter of importance. If I were advising Obama, I'd make sure that Kroft got the next exclusive interview too.