Judd Gregg Is Not The First To Encounter "The Audacity Of Confusion"

Still, Mr. [Rashid] Khalidi said ascertaining Mr. Obama’s precise position was often difficult. “You may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” he said. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

New York Times, May 11, 2008

That seems to be a partern. Abe Greenwald writes about Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, who withdrew his nomination for Commerce Secretary, saying that:

[I]t has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me. Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.”[emphasis added]

Greenwald goes on to suggest that there may be a pattern of people who enter into discussions with President Obama only to apparently came out with an understanding at variance with what Obama did:

...person after person engages Barack Obama on vital topics only to look back and realize that they don’t quite know what the President said. During a phone chat, Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski thought Obama had promised him an Eastern European missile defense system; he was wrong. Gen. Anthony Zinni thought the administration had given him the ambassadorship to Iraq; he was wrong. Judd Gregg is only the most recent Obama interlocutor to be undone by the Audacity of Confusion.

If Greenwald is correct, one may wonder if you could add Hillary Clinton to the list--and perhaps the entire far left wing of the Democratic Party.

Technorati Tag: Obama and Judd Gregg.