Remember Obama the Non-conformist?

(Does everyone else?)

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online makes an interesting point about the president:

Way back in 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama was making statements like these, suggesting he wanted to seriously reform affirmative action, shifting it from a program that evaluated people based on race and instead evaluated people based upon income:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why should your
 daughters, when they go to college, get affirmative action?”

OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think that my daughters should
 probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty
 advantaged, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with us taking that
 into account as we consider admissions policies at universities. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to 
have what it takes to succeed.

The nuanced position on affirmative action was a pretty important point in establishing Obama as a Democrat who wasn’t a down-the-line liberal. The media largely concurred with his self-definition as a pragmatist or a centrist; after all, he had defied the liberal line with his criticism of the increasing national debt as “unpatriotic”, his declaration to Rick Warren that he believed marriage was “the union between a man and a woman,” and his insistence that “we’re going to have to take on entitlements, and we’re going to have to do it quickly.”

You see where I’m going with this.

Here we are, seven years later. Obama has been president for five of them. He’s run up record amounts of debt, he’s announced his support for gay marriage, and there’s no sign that any entitlement reform will be enacted during his presidency. And affirmative action remains the same as it was before, as the Obama administration argues existing programs should remain in place as they are.

(Read the whole thing: “Positions Don’t Define Politicians, Actions Do.”)

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