Then:
When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what’s in them and nobody has read them … It gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate, then these kinds of things happen. And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean, you remember, there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.
- Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on the (now defunct) Randi Rhodes show on Air America, November 22, 2004
Now:
There are those who say the plans in this budget are too ambitious to enact … They say that in the face of challenges that we face, we should be trying to do less, than more. What I say is that the challenges we face are too large to ignore. The cost of our health care is too high to ignore. The dependence on oil is too dangerous to ignore. Our education deficit is growing too wide to ignore. To kick these problems down the road for another four years or another eight years would be to continue the same irresponsibility that led us to this point. That's not why I ran for this office. I didn't come here to pass on our problems to the next President or the next generation; I came here to solve them.
- President Barack Obama, March 17, 2009
Would you characterize this as:
(a) Flip-flopping?
(b) Hypocrisy?
(c) Result-oriented agenda-driven thumb-in-the-wind politicking?
(d) Authoritarian power grab?
… or (e) All of the Above?
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