Reader Responses

Democrat Barack Obama, responding to claims he has shifted stances on several key issues, said people who think that “haven’t apparently been listening to me.”

Since wrapping up the Democratic nomination, Obama has voiced positions that break with the party’s left and with his own previous stands on topics including Iraq, guns and the death penalty.

Liberals are unhappy with Obama’s support of compromise rules for the government’s wiretapping program in a Senate vote this week. Obama’s statements favoring firearms rights after the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s gun ban also has drawn criticism, as has his break with death penalty foes when he disagreed with a Supreme Court decision outlawing executions of people who rape children.

Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, said Obama is now “just tracking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.”

The response of conservative critics is that Obama “puts politics ahead of principle” and “has proven his rhetoric to be nothing but empty words and broken pledges.”

Do you think Obama’s shift to more conservative positions on key issues in his political comments will cost him support, or is it a wise political move?

Reader comments on this topic are invited for use in the “As You See It” forum to be carried in the Monday, July 21, Tyler Morning Telegraph. Responses should be limited to 350 words and should be received at the newspaper office by Thursday, July 17, to allow time for processing.

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Tyler Morning Telegraph, P.O. Box 2030, Tyler, TX 75710. E-mail: opinion@tylerpaper.com.