The Latest Rake

....in a series of them that Barack Hussein Obama has stepped on and driven right into that GQ mush:

Senator Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign.

It’s an unusual stance for a presidential candidate. Policy makers have largely treated monitoring of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a legal matter left to the Justice Department since an independent review board was set up in 1992 to eliminate mob influence in the union.

Senator Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, has declined to take a stance on Teamsters oversight. During his eight years in office, President Bill Clinton took no action to end the special board. Democratic presidential nominees in 2000 and 2004 — Al Gore and John Kerry — didn’t address the issue, according to Teamsters officials....

John Coli, vice president for the Teamsters central region, who brokered the Teamsters endorsement, said Sen. Obama was “pretty definitive that the time had come to start the beginning of the end” of the three-member independent review board that investigates suspect activity in the union. Mr. Coli said that Senator Obama conveyed that view in a series of phone conversations and meetings with Teamsters officials last year.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed the candidate’s position in a statement to the Wall Street Journal, saying that Senator Obama believes that the board “has run its course,” because “organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined.” Mr. Vietor said Senator Obama took that position last year.

That middle 'graph is telling.  As hard-left as Fat Albert and the Boston Balker were, they didn't go near this particular issue.  The Clintons were a functioning branch of organized crime and even they didn't go there.  But Barack Hussein Obama wades in with both feet jammed squarely in that rake-shattered puss.

Either he is a courageous champion of the working man daring to go where angels fear to tread, or he is a radical, turd-in-every-pocket panderer whose penchant for rookie campaign mistakes is insatiable.

Per the established Obama "oops, did I do something wrong?" pattern, he has already started the non-backtracking backtrack:

SAWYER: Want to turn to the news of the day. Front page of the Wall Street Journal today, it says before you won the endorsement of the Teamsters, you indicated to them you would support ending strict federal oversight of the union, which was imposed back in the early ’90s to deal with corruption. Was that commitment made to them?

OBAMA: You know, I wouldn’t make any blanket commitments. what I’ve said is that we should take a look at what’s been happening over the Teamsters and at all unions to make sure that, in fact, you know, organized labor is able to represent its membership and engage in collective bargaining in accordance to what we’ve always believed.

SAWYER: But if they heard you to be saying that you did support, you did support lifting this strict federal oversight, are they wrong?

OBAMA: No, what I’ve said is that I would examine what is going on in terms of the federal oversight that’s been taking place, but it’s been in place for many years, the union has done a terrific job cleaning house, and the question is whether they’re going to be able to get treated just like every other union, whether that time has come and that’s something that I’ll absolutely examine when I’m president of the United States.

Translation: Yeah, I told the Teamsters I'd bail 'em out and let their mob connections come out of hiding and resume business as usual, but now that those bitter, clinging, cynical blabbermouths at the WSJ have screwed me yet again, I'm going to bury that promise in so much rhetorical fog that by the time I'm finished you won't even be certain there IS a Teamsters Union.  Now get out your prayer rug and bow down to me, already; I've got a busy schedule to keep.

BO doesn't deny he promised Jimmy Hoffa to call off the federal dogs so much as amorphously justify it.  It's a variation on his "saying nothing in ten thousand words or more" technique.  Problem is it's exceedingly difficult to say nothing about something without coming across as evasive.  Despite all the practice Obama's bottomless pit of ill-considered extremism is giving him at it, he's still no close to mastering it than he was two months ago.

That's the difference between vaguely indignant mealy-mouthedness and sheer audacity.  In Obama's place, Bill Clinton would have either brazenly defended the Teamster promise and had a majority of Americans nodding their heads and muttering, "Yeah, he's right, what's the big deal?"; or denied it and already so villified the WSJ that a mob completed with hissing torches and sharpened pitchforks would be besieging their Manhattan offices.  His wife, of course, simply knew not to go there.

It is symptomatic of why Mrs. Clinton is going to be the Democrat nominee.  Obama will probably still make it to Denver with more pledged delegates, but the superduperdelegates, even in a cycle that's as sure-thing as this one, are not going to gamble on a neophyte blinded by his own callow radicalism, no matter HOW much the nutroots love him.

Double-H really should know better than to buy into anything al-Reuters spouts.  But this passage is his party hackery run amok:

Even the most reluctant conservative will have to recognize that Barack Obama represents the wholesale abandonment of the country to the hard left's agenda.  The nomination of Obama complete's John McCain's outreach to the conservative wing of his party.

Even the blindest conservative should recognize several things:

1) We don't HAVE to "recognize" anything;

2) What party hacks should do is put their principles and their hard-headed realism ahead of their party affiliation.  Barack Hussein Obama represents the wholesale abandonment of the Democrat Party to the hard-left's agenda; but John Sith McCain represents the wholesale abandonment of the GOP to the exact same thing.

3) The past six weeks illustrates precisely why Obama will not be nominated; the past ten years illustrates why McCain should not have been nominated, and cannot win in November.

4) Calling Obama part of McCain's finger-crossed outreach to the Right is simply another way of saying, "Where else are conservatives going to go?"  The answer to which is still the same: we stay home, or vote in the down-ballot races but abstain from voting in the presidential race.  Because we will not be fooled and betrayed yet again.

And neither will the Dems.