(Reuters) It's the year of the flip-flop in U.S. politics

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0836055720070610?src=061007_1442_ARTICLE_PROMO_also_on_reuters

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what has become the year of the flip-flop, U.S. presidential candidates have been accusing each other of switching positions on policy issues as often as they change their clothes.

Campaign researchers are leaving no stone unturned in their search for information on rival candidates, hoping to duplicate President George W. Bush's successful charge in 2004 that Democrat John Kerry voted for Iraq war funding before he voted against it.

The most famous examples this year are Republican Mitt Romney's shifting position on abortion and Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton's move from hawk to dove on Iraq.

But is changing positions, or flip-flopping, all that bad?

"Most of the people who we regard as our greatest presidents have made massive turnarounds in their careers," said Bruce Schulman, a political history professor at Boston University, who has studied flip-flops.

A prime example would be Abraham Lincoln. He ran for president in 1860 with no intention of doing anything about slavery in places where it existed, only to issue the Emancipation Proclamation banning slavery in 1863.


FULL 3 page story at link.

[annabanana]

1. I am beginning to think that being a "campaign adviser" is somehow

damaging to the brain. They are always fighting the last war.