"Read His Lips ..."

No doubt about it: Barack Obama's a versatile man. Besides his masterful channeling of George W. Slow-puppy, he also does a great Richard Nixon:

President Obama's top political adviser declined yesterday to rule out the possibility that the White House would agree to a tax hike on health insurance plans that would hit middle-income Americans.

Speaking on ABC's "This Week," David Axelrod declined to repeat Obama's "firm pledge" during the campaign that families making under $250,000 would not see "any form of tax increase, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

Instead, Axelrod said the president has no interest in "drawing lines in the sand" on the issue of how to pay for the costly health reform plan making its way through Congress.

"One of the problems we've had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don't get anything done," Axelrod said. "That's not the way the president approaches this."

What was it Tricky Dick's press secretary said, during the Watergate scandal, back in the days when there was some semblance of an adversary, watchdog relationship between the press and the gummint? After some lie or other came to light, press secretary Ron Nessen said, "That statement is no longer operative." Now Mr. Axelrod has a new one: to keep one's word is "drawing a line in the sand," and that's very bad because "you don't get anything done." Well, there's another couple of folks who look very good up against the wall, wearing blindfolds, in my "After the Revo" fantasy.