Clarify What?

The Washington Post‘s editorial board gives us “Mr. Obama’s Show: This week in Denver, the nominee will have a chance to make clearer where he would lead the country”. But throughout the editorial, they don’t actually seem able to identify any particular issues where they’re troubled by a lack of clarity from Obama. On the contrary, they concede that Obama “has laid out a set of detailed policy positions — more detailed, in some key areas, such as health care, than Mr. McCain.” So instead they come up with this complaint, Obama hasn’t laid out in sufficient detail which issues are the issues on which he’d be prepared to agree to legislation that doesn’t precisely match up with his preferred policies:

Where would a President Obama stand firm on principle? Where would he bend to achieve consensus? How would he balance the competing, and to some extent mutually exclusive, imperatives of mobilizing for leftward change and forging bipartisan agreement? These are difficult questions to answer in the abstract; they cannot be fully resolved by four days of speechifying or even a brilliant reprise of Mr. Obama’s Boston performance. But many voters will be looking for clues this week.

But, look, surely we understand why neither Obama nor John McCain nor any other presidential candidate would want to outline in advance which positions they’re prepared to retreat from in the face of congressional opposition. When Cindy McCain’s buying beach condos, she doesn’t say “I’ll give you $1 million for that one in Coronado, but I’d be willing to pay as much as $1.5 million if you’re not amenable to my first offer.” That’s common sense. Of course it’s true that I, as a citizen and generally curious person, would like to know what Obama’s real bottom lines are — McCain’s, too, for that matter — but he’s not going to tell me, so what’s the sense in complaining about it?