Barack just a pollie after all

THE latest political gimmick is to claim there is no difference between Left and Right any more. In his bid to become prime minister, Kevin Rudd wrapped himself in the language of post-partisanship last year.

Democrat Barack Obama is taking it to new levels in his bid to win the US presidency. He is the post-partisan candidate, he says, the man gliding above old-style politics in an age where ideology is apparently a thing of the past. Notice how it's only those on the Left who cloak themselves in this talk of post-partisanship? In time, reality is likely to prove this to be just another duplicitous political trick to hide real political agendas.

With the Cold War over and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it may be that the contours of the political landscape have shifted to the point where battles between capital and labour are now minor skirmishes. Certainly, it would be splendid to assume there is now some grand consensus, where principles of free markets and the freedom of the individual have prevailed to the point where the battles between Left and Right can be relegated to the chapters of political history covering 1917 to 1989.

So what's left to fight about in 2008? In a word, plenty. For all of his high-falutin' talk about being Post-Partisan Man, Obama is perpetrating a hoax on American voters. Anyone familiar with Obama's political history would realise that he is to the left of Teddy Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. He is ranked as the most liberal senator by the National Journal's 27th annual analysis of congressional voting patterns. No surprise given he has voted against tax cuts, opposed bans on partial birth abortion, and has shown an anathema towards free trade pacts.

America's most left-wing senator is pitching himself as the transforming, unifying figure who represents a new style of politics. As keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he wooed Democrats by announcing: "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America: there is the United States of America." So began a love affair with the senator for Illinois.

In recent weeks, post-partisan Obama has traumatised many Democrats by lurching to the Right. Turns out there is a conservative America.

But then Obama was never a credible post-partisan politician. As a senator, he has never sided with his opponents in Congress. Not once. In reality, Obama is the gritty Chicago politician who knows that, having sewn up the primaries with his left-wing rhetoric, a different political calculation is now required to win the White House.

Such is his raw political cunning, Obama planned a political rally at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, the historical symbol of German unification. German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected it as inappropriate.

Called the Potomac shuffle, presidential candidates traditionally move centre to shore up the swing voters and try to take votes from their opponents. But even by the standards of yore, Obama is, as one American commentator said, "quite a mover on the dance floor." Having rejected old-style political manipulation, Obama is now mastering the art.

Obama has shifted from his original position of talking with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with "no precondition". He has moderated his policy of withdrawing US soldiers from Iraq. And the hip young Democrat has been lip-synching the words of conservatives on the US Supreme Court by supporting the death penalty for child rapists and backing the Second Amendment right of Americans to own handguns.

Obama is shrewd. He knows he has to play down Hollywood's love affair with him, the fact that Europe has gone ga-ga over him and those soft-lens photos of him that keep appearing on the front cover of Rolling Stone. So, he has recently courted the religious Right by supporting President George W. Bush's initiative to promote "faith-based" social welfare programs.

He has reached out to white working-class voters by donning a flag pin on his lapel, something he eschewed right after September 11, telling reporters that "my patriotism speaks for itself". Now he's hoping that his flag pin will speak to voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where he lost the primaries against Hillary Clinton.

Far from being the post-partisan healer of a divided nation, there are, as David Brooks wrote in The New York Times, two Obamas. The great orator who uses high-minded, post-partisan language and operates at a policy free zone of 10,000 metres. And then there's Fast Eddy: the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago politician who'd throw you under a truck for votes. Actually, Obama threw his grandmother and his preacher under that truck in order to win votes when they said things that didn't suit his campaign.

Yet Obama still speaks the appealing language of post-partisanship. Fused with the even more powerful message of change, Obama's core constituency of well-heeled progressives love it. Sections of the media adore it. So do idealistic young students, who have taken to adopting Obama's middle name - Hussein - as a sign of solidarity. And if middle America falls for it too, it's because they want to believe the post-partisan rhetoric. It's not because it's true.

Indeed, American voters would do well to cast their eyes over to Australia. A not dissimilar line of post-partisanship was paraded during our federal election last year. Rudd, the Labor politician, eschewed Left labels. He was the self-declared "economic conservative". And it was heartening to see a Rudd Labor Government appoint a minister for deregulation.

Unfortunately their pre-election sensible economic talk is undermined by their post-election climate change walk. The Rudd Government's position on climate change reflects that stubborn attachment to utopian solutions. There is no pragmatic caution or economic conservatism on show as they push ahead with an emissions trading system that will impose on Australian businesses and consumers the single biggest set of regulations and costs seen in this country. All for a good cause, they say. But that good cause is built on a classic left-wing hope and a prayer, not reality.

The Rudd Government hopes that the biggest emitters of carbon - India, China and the US - will follow suit. And the Australian economy will be punished until that climate change utopia is reached. As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal Asia said yesterday, "Rudd just wants to do what every Labor pol likes: tax industry and redistribute the proceeds, at huge cost to the economy."

No more Left and Right? Wrong. Just as Australian voters are now discovering that post-partisan talk is crafty election rhetoric, American voters may discover even greater duplicity in Obama's post-partisan bid for the White House. Underneath his powerful message lies an old-fashioned tax and spend, big government liberal. The question is whether that happens before or after they choose their next president.