‘no great principles to compromise’

Substitute “Obama” for “Clinton”:

Every politician accumulates IOUs, but Clinton has them by the truckload, starting with Wall Street. The herald of ‘change’ is utterly traditional in his fealty to the traditional lobbies, starting with the military-industrial complex.

... The week before the election, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette unleashed some of the harshest abuse that the governor had ever sustained. The editorial asked what Governor Clinton's record could teach us about President Clinton:

‘A purely rhetorical approach to issues that may please all, coupled with a tendency to side with those interests powerful enough to do him some political good ...

‘Finally, and sadly, there is the unavoidable question of character ... it is not the duplicitous in his politics that concerns so much as the polished ease, the almost habitual, casual, articulate way he bobs and weaves. He has mastered the art of equivocation. There is something almost inhuman in his smoother responses that sends a shiver up the spine. It is not the compromises he has made that trouble so much as the unavoidable suspicion that he has no great principles to compromise.’

—Alexander Cockburn, Nov. 6, 1992, The Golden Age Is In Us