Barack in the MiddleKeeping tabs on Obama's shifts toward the center.

"Senator Obama has serious concerns about many provisions in this bill, especially the provision on giving retroactive immunity to the telephone companies. … [I]f the bill comes to the Senate floor in its current form, he would support a filibuster of it."
—Spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 23, 2007

The act "is a marked improvement over last year's Protect America Act. … It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."
—Barack Obama, June 20, 2008

"Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper. But any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized, and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."
—Barack Obama, June 4, 2008.
His campaign later clarified that "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties."

In an op-ed that appeared in an Iowa newspaper last September, Obama proposed a tax structure that would lift the cap on income taxed for Social Security, which currently stands at $102,000. The proposal would raise an estimated $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Last month in Columbus, Ohio, Obama proposed a plan that would maintain the payroll tax exemption for income between $102,000 and $250,000 a year. This proposal would raise only an estimated $629 billion, and it would inoculate Obama from charges that he wants an upper-middle-class tax hike.

Obama declined to sign a Senate measure condemning MoveOn.org for its "General Betray Us" ad, dismissing the resolution as a political stunt. "The focus of the United States Senate should be on ending this war, not on criticizing newspaper advertisements," he said in a statement on Sept. 20, 2007.

In his June 30 speech on patriotism, Obama said, "All too often, our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments, a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal."

"I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced. And that is not what has been happening so far."
—Feb. 26, 2008.
He also called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake."

Obama declined to answer questions about whether he would have signed President Clinton's welfare-reform package. "I'm not going to relitigate what happened back in the '90s," Obama said on July 17, 2007. "I'm talking about what's going to be happening going forward." Back in 1997, when President Clinton signed the bill, Obama suggested he would not.

A new Obama ad touts the federal legislation, which "slashed the rolls by 80 percent."