The Fine Art of the Political Flip-Flop

The political art of the flip-flop is a wonderful thing to behold, when a politician gets caught doing it. A flip-flop occurs when a politician, usually one running for office, takes a position that is the complete opposite of the one he or she took in recent memory.

The most flagrant example of the flip-flop took place during the 2004 Campaign when Senator John Kerry, in an attempt to explain his vote against an eighty seven billion dollar funding bill for the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, said, "I was for the eighty seventy billion dollars before I was against it." Senator Kerry was so arrogant that he apparently was unaware of how that sounded. His Republican opponents were merciless, though, and reminded him and everyone else in ads and statements how it did sound.

The current master (or mistress if you will) of the flip-flop is Senator Hillary Clinton, the presumed favorite for the Democratic nomination for President. She has, sometimes in the same speech, suggested that as President she would pull troops out of Iraq and leave troops in Iraq at least to the end of her hypothetical first term. This behavior has outraged the anti-war left and has amused everyone else.

A politician engages in a flip-flop for one of two reasons. First the politician will flip-flop if poll numbers concerning an issue suddenly take a shift toward the opposite of the original position. The trick is that in this age of the Internet and instant video, there is usually a clear record of a politician taking the opposite of the current position in recent memory.

For example, there is a record of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid proclaiming the dangers of not throwing down on Saddam Hussein back in 2002 and 2003. It is therefore difficult for them to proclaim the same throwing down a mistake four years later, especially when radio talk show hosts are gleefully playing tapes of their somewhat more hawkish views they took before the war.

Even better, now that the troop surge has been successful in driving Al Qaeda out of various provinces in Iraq, many of these politicians have started to mute their opposition to the war. Very few people, not even Nancy Pelosi, wants the image of the last helicopter fleeing the Green Zone in Baghdad while the city burns and people telling them, "We would have won if not for you."

The other reason that a politician engages in the political art of the flip-flop is a desire to be all things to all people. This is a natural desire on the part of some politicians, as their instinct is to maximize their political support. Take any position on any issue and a politician will necessarily annoy a large part of the electorate.

So a politician will tell a business audience that he or she is in favor of lower taxes, the better to encourage economic growth. Then he or she will tell an audience of working class folks that he or she is in favor of raising taxes "on the rich" the better to finance some kind of new social entitlement program designed principally to buy votes.

This kind of flip-flop is especially dangerous, again in an age of instant video and the Internet. The trick is to parse one's words so that one can claim that there is no contradiction between the two positions. One is in favor of "targeted tax cuts" to encourage business and "revenue enhancements" to make the rich pay their "fair share." Then one hopes that enough people are credulous enough to buy it.

In closing, there is one type of instance when a politician can change his or her mind based on new facts and not be (fairly at least) accusing of flip-flopping. President George W. Bush came into office having campaigned upon the promise of a "humble" foreign policy, not designed to interfere over much with the affairs of other countries. President Bush had wanted to spend his time in office cutting taxes, improving education, and doing other needed domestic reforms.

Fate had other plans for President Bush and the nation. 9/11 proved to President Bush and quite a few other people that not only the national security of the United States, but also the physical safety of her people required a great deal of interference. And so began the great war to smite terrorists wherever they lived and to bring democracy to the Middle East, just as FDR brought democracy to Germany and Japan and Reagan to Eastern Europe.

That's not a flip-flop. That is a change of policy based on new facts (or perhaps old ones made very clear.) That President Bush has persisted in this new vision, even in the teeth of political opposition and falling poll numbers, shows that rather than being a flip-flopper, he is instead a statesman. A statesman who will be remembered for the ages.