A surprising number of people seem to be going a bit ZOMG teh c0v3rup!!1! over reports that several "agenda" pages on Barack Obama's freshly-launched transition site, Change.gov, were recently taken down. Or, if you have a taste for melodrama, "scrubbed" from the site, like unsightly soap scum. The Washington Times is typically breathless, with a stock line-up of quotation-slingers blasting the change as "the opposite of transparency" and speculating about which flips Obama's about to flop. Wade out into the blogs and you'll find ominous intimations that the pages contained "radical, liberal ideas that the Obama campaign must have decided it didn’t want Americans to scrutinize just yet."
Except as far as I can tell—and as a few of the stories about this seem to confirm—the "agenda" pages that were pulled down are just verbatim copies of all the "issues" backgrounders that have been up on the Obama campaign site for months now. If this is an attempt to hide a radical agenda, it's a stunningly inept one, because they're all still up there. I have no idea why the pages were pulled from the newer site, though I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of campaign position papers copied over hastily for the launch needed to be retooled to read more like a coherent and ordered presidential agenda.
Whatever the reason, if there's any substantive change in Obama's positions—whether overt or implicit—we're not going to need sophisticated data forensics, or even the Wayback Machine, to discover it. If any significant component of Obama's health plan were so much as tweaked, you'd have 500 wonks yodeling it from the rooftops inside an hour. If he decided to pull the 147th Forward Support Company out of Iraq a week ahead of the 327th Infantry Regiment, Talking Points Memo would do an eight-part series. The chances of the president-elect surreptitiously pivoting on any issue of greater moment than his new puppy's eye color are, to a first approximation, nil.
