The chattering classes are never hungrier for a new narrative than now, in the newsless, distracted days of summer. Which is why they're so grateful to Barack Obama for serving them their latest story on the proverbial silver platter. Since securing the Democratic presidential nomination in early June, the Illinois senator has seemed to pirouette toward the political center on a number of issues, providing every starving pundit with the plot points they need to spin a dramatic yarn about, you know, unprincipled political opportunism.

Few have declined the offer. On the right, National Review editor Rich Lowry says that "what makes Obama's "textbook" dash to the center so extraordinary is not just its speed, but how it falsifies the very essence of his candidacy." "Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both?" Lowry asks. Meanwhile, on the left, the New York Times' Bob Herbert--"perhaps the most astute crystallizer and propagator of orthodox Democratic opinion"--accuses Obama of "lurching right when it suits him" and "zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash." Even the Times' ed board has weighed in. "We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election," it wrote on July 4. "Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games." (No word yet on whether he's stopped kissing babies and started eating them instead.)

With every wag in Washington now repeating this tale, we here at Stumper headquarters thought it would be worthwhile to pause, take a deep breath and actually examine the evidence of Obama's recent "transformation." What we found is--unsurprisingly--not as simple as the MSM would have you believe.

A pair of Obama's newly "moderate" positions, for example, aren't new at all. When Obama criticized the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision late last month striking down the use of the death penalty in cases of child rape--siding with arch-conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas over the more liberal Supremes--the left cried foul. "What was the man thinking?," wrote Herbert. But whether or not you believe, like Herbert, that Obama's position is "barbaric," it's wrong conclude that the senator fabricated it for the general election. In fact, Obama's death-penalty stance dates back at least to 2006, when he wrote in "The Audacity of Hope" that "there are some crimes--mass murder, the rape and murder of a child--so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment." Likewise, Obama's plan to expand President George W. Bush's efforts to "empower faith-based organizations"--characterized by liberals after it was announced last week in Zanesville, Ohio as a pander to evangelicals and a threat to the separation of church and state--is perfectly consistent with Obama's past as Christian, church-based community organizer. "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square," he said in a celebrated June 2006 speech on religion. In other words, Obama actually believes that faith-based programs are a good investment for government.

Upon closer inspection, most of the rest of Obama's alleged zigs and zags seem less like "flip flops" than the usual shifts in emphasis that occur as conditions change and/or a candidate transitions out of the primaries and into the general election. Take Iraq. Much of the recent uproar centers around remarks the senator made late last week in Fargo, N.D. indicating that "the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability." "When I go to Iraq, and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground," he added, "I'm sure I'll have more information and will continue to refine my policies." Egged on by an eager John McCain, many commentators quickly concluded that Obama, who has long said he hopes to "have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months," had softened his stance.

But to believe McCain's assessment also requires one to believe that, before last week, Obama planned to stick to his 16-month timetable no matter what the military brass said, no matter what was happening on the ground and no matter what sort of trouble it would create for American soldiers. The truth is, Obama has always left open the option of taking more time if necessary. At a Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H. on Sept. 26, 2007, for example, Tim Russert pressed Obama as to whether he would have all troops out by the end of his first term. "I think it's hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible," Obama said. "We don't know what contingency will be out there. I will drastically reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians and making sure that we're carrying out counterterrorism activities there. I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out." And a month later, the senator told the Times that the U.S. has to make sure “we are not just willy-nilly removing troops” and that withdrawal may “take a little bit longer” in certain areas.

That's what Obama is saying now, too: given the situation on the ground, more time (and input) may in fact be necessary. Is the Democrat's sudden decision to emphasize his flexibility--as opposed to his promise to end the war, as he did in the primaries--a political calculation? Absolutely. Having locked up the left's anti-war vote, he now wants to woo moderates. But that doesn't mean----at least when it comes to how (and not whether) we withdraw from Iraq--that he hasn't always been willing (like any reasonable leader) to adjust.

Obama's "shift" on the D.C. handgun ban was similar. In the primaries, he wriggled out of personally weighing in on the law--again, to protect his left flank--then embraced the Supreme Court's decision striking it down. This was also about politics, not principles. But the fact remains that the ruling was not inconsistent with his long-held (if lawyerly) belief that gun ownership is an individual right that's still subject to reasonable limitations. In other words, his core stance stayed the same--even as he maneuvered for maximum political gain.

That said, Obama is not without his authentic flip flops. The biggest and baddest: FISA. Last October, the nominee vowed to "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies" that cooperated with President Bush's program to eavesdrop domestically after Sept. 11. But now, as the Times puts it, "he supports the immunity clause as part of what he calls a compromise but actually is a classic, cynical Washington deal that erodes the power of the special court, virtually eliminates 'vigorous oversight' and allows more warrantless eavesdropping than ever." (He voted in favor of the clause in the Senate today.) Obama has already received significant blowback from liberals for this stark reversal, which was clearly meant to insulate him from Republican charges that he's weak on security. And deservedly so. 

To sum up: one flip-flop, two shifts in emphasis and two red herrings. To me, that's hardly the most shocking show of "calculation and bad faith by a politician" "in recent political memory"; McCain, for example, zig-zagged mightily to win the GOP nod . Of course, Republicans have every right to pounce on Obama's post-primary record, and to try to link these lurches to his non-ideological maneuvering on public-financing and joint town halls. But I suspect objective observers who are disappointed with Obama fundamentally misunderstand  what sort of politician he is. Unlike the Times ed board, I've never considered the senator "a man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games." That makes him sound like Norman Thomas or Ralph Nader. Instead, I tend to side with David Brooks, who recently wrote that the Democratic nominee is "the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades." Why? Because "even Bill Clinton wasn't smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics."

That--not hippy-dippy "hope"--is Obama's promise. I agree with the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder that the senator as "driven by his own instinctive need to re-evaluate what he knows and does not know, his preference for consensus over conflict, his ability to balance competing values and his assessment of the politics of the possible." It's that agility that will help him harness bipartisan support as president--not his "passionate convictions," which, as numerous newsniks have pointed out, are reliably partisan. If Obama can pull off the dangerous trick he's now attempting--that is, making moderates more comfortable voting for him without actually abandoning his core beliefs or destroying the perception that he's "not like every other politician"--he will have both moved himself one step closer to the White House and shown how (ruthlessly?) effective he could be once there.  

Again, "succeed[ing] in politics by pretending to renounce politics" was the formula that carried Obama through the primaries. Right now, the jury's still out on whether it will be enough to win an election. But you can't say he isn't trying.