Op-Ed Columns

Every four years the summer Olympics coincide with the U.S. presidential election, so you may be excused if, in company with many others, you sometimes find yourself confused as to just what is an Olympic event and what is a political one.

Here, to help you clear matters up, is one example: Gymnastics is an Olympic event. Flip-flopping is a political one.

You could easily think differently, from all the hubbub and back and forth cheers and boos lately attending the latter.

There's poor John McCain, belly down on the mat from his last dismount. There's poor Barack Obama, flailing around on his back like an overturned turtle, after his vault.

Most recently, and most gravely if you judge by the crowd noise, Obama, having once pretty much sworn that he would stick with public funding for his campaign, has opted instead to go for the big-donor bucks. And McCain, long-time and stout opponent of off-shore drilling for oil, no longer cares if the oceans are drilled till they drain.

Here are some basic truths about flip-flopping:

• Any politician who has never flipped or flopped has no business being president. Mindless rectitude in the face of contrary reality means the candidate never adjusted to changed circumstances or suffered enough introspection to have second thoughts. That kind of rigidity is swell for martyrdom, terrible for governing.

• Many flip-flops aren't, really. Obama has been sniped at for first refusing to disavow his former pastor while disavowing the pastor's loopier-seeming homiletics and then later dumping him. But Jeremiah Wright's ranting performance before a National Press Club audience in the meantime in effect dared Obama to do what Obama then sensibly did.

• Watch McCain in panting pursuit of televangelists he once rightly disdained. It is in the nature of all politicians to prefer election to defeat, even on the Straight Talk Express. Most, in most campaigns, find it necessary to wiggle this way and that toward their goal, as snakes do. And caught at it, most rationalize rather than apologize. (See above: funding, Obama.)

It is up to you to decide whether the wiggles are acceptable tactical realism or craven cynicism. It is likely you will find that the candidate you leaned toward in the first place makes tactical adjustments and the one you never much liked anyway is a craven cynic.

This high water mark of flip-flopping — as an issue, not as a practice, which is fairly constant — was in 2004.

Republicans pounded John Kerry mercilessly for having changed course at times in his long and admirable Senate career. And they pounded even harder and more often when they found that by way of riposte Kerry actually tried to explain, rather than tendering a zesty "So's yer old lady!"

That concludes today's lesson. In our next class, we will take up gotacha politics, in which the principal and surrogates of one candidacy, who in fact are not in the least offended, pretend to purple umbrage over an infelicity from the opposition campaign, which utterance can with effort be taken as meaning what it patently was not intended to mean.

Tom Teepen is an Atlanta-based columnist for Cox Newspapers. E-mail: teepencolumn@earthlink.net.