I want to read up a bit more and I can’t now because I’m on deadline. But listening to NPR this morning and catching some of Olbermann’s outright hysteria last night, you’d think this was some kind of silver bullet. First, on the issue of flip-flops. Obama’s got a bundle. Yawn, from the pro-Obama media. Biden’s record looks like the water trail of a fish flapping around on the dock. He was anti-abortion before he was pro-abortion. He was pro-Bork before he was anti-Bork. He was pro-Iraq war before he was anti-Iraq war. And so on. And yet no one is racing to their fainting couches about any of that.
Oh and both these guys voted for the Bridge to Nowhere.
As for the actual flip-floppiness. There doesn’t seem to be that much there there. When she was campaigning for governor the bridge to nowhere was essentially a local project. When in office, she took a look at it and defied the entire Republican political establishment in Alaska and turned against it. Even the Democratic Party of Alaska credited her with killing the bridge (though now they won’t admit it). On NPR they made it sound like she killed the bridge due to the controversy in Washington over it. Well, again, controversies in Washington aren’t the same controversies in Alaska. The state lives off pork. The suggestion that she was flip-flopping out of expediency alone betrays, at minimum, a kind of inside-the-beltway myopia. No one in Alaska has ever paid a serious price at the polls merely for raiding the federal treasury (legally). But many have had their careers wrecked by trying to get in the way of Ted Stevens and Don Young and their pursuit of pork.
Geraghty has similar thoughts.