According to a survey on political positions completed by Barak Obama in 1996, the candidate said he opposed capital punishment, opposed parental notification of abortions being sought by minors, and supported measures to "ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns". When asked about a single-payer system for healthcare
He claims to support none of these positions today.
Ordinarily this would not be a problem: people change their minds. Politicians are people. Therefore politicians change their minds.
But the problem here is that Obama claims he never opposed capital punishment, never opposed parental notification of abortions being sought by minors, and never supported measures to "ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns".
A week after Politico provided the questionnaire to the Obama campaign for comment, an aide called Monday night to say that Obama had said he did not fill out the form, and provided a contact for his campaign manager at the time, who said she filled it out. It includes first-person comments such as: “I have not previously been a candidate.”
So according to Obama, he never filled out that questionaire himself and the staffer who did, misrepresented his positions
...Obama says he supports the death penalty in limited circumstances, such as an especially heinous crime. The campaign says Obama has consistently supported the death penalty “in principle” and opposed it “in practice.”
On handguns, his campaign said he has consistently been for “common-sense limits, but not banning” throughout his 11-year political career...
“His views are very much in the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” said chief strategist David Axelrod, who has known Obama since 1992 and worked with him since 2002. “There are some issues on which he’s probably viewed more conservatively. He’s been a consistent voice on issues of, for example, parental responsibility and pushed those hard, because he believes in them.”
Unfortunately for Obama, further digging by Politico
determined that Obama was actually interviewed about the issues on the questionnaire by the liberal Chicago nonprofit group that issued it. And it found that Obama — the day after sitting for the interview — filed an amended version of the questionnaire, which appears to contain Obama’s own handwritten notes added to one answer.
When presented with this evidence
...Obama... did not dispute that the handwriting was his. But he contended it doesn’t prove he completed, approved — or even read — the latter questionnaire.
Huh.
