With a decision on the Heller case imminent, the Barack Obama campaign is flip-flopping backtracking away from an earlier statement that the DC statute in question is constitutional:

ABC News' Teddy Davis and Alexa Ainsworth Report: With the Supreme Court poised to rule on Washington, D.C.'s, gun ban, the Obama campaign is disavowing what it calls an "inartful" statement to the Chicago Tribune last year in which an unnamed aide characterized Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as believing that the DC ban was constitutional.

"That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator's consistent position," Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News.

The statement which Burton describes as an inaccurate representation of the senator's views was made to the Chicago Tribune on Nov. 20, 2007.

In a story entitled, "Court to Hear Gun Case," the Chicago Tribune's James Oliphant and Michael J. Higgins wrote ". . . the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he '...believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.'"

http://www.topix.com/content/trb/2007/11/court-to-hear-gun-case

As to why it's inaccurate now, they're not saying it has anything to do with the pending Heller decision. Rather it's inaccurate because Obama has "refrained from developing a position."

No really.

The Chicago Tribune clip from Nov. 20, 2007, is an inaccurate representation of Obama's views, according to Burton, because the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has refrained from developing a position on whether the D.C. gun law runs afoul of the Second Amendment.

When Obama has been asked on multiple occasions to weigh in on the D.C. gun case he has regularly maintained that the Second Amendment provides an individual right while at the same time saying that right is not absolute and that the Constitution does not prevent local governments from enacting what Obama calls "common sense laws."

Although he has been willing to describe his general views on this topic, Obama has sidestepped the question of whether the ban in the nation's capital runs afoul of the Second Amendment.

He is disavowing his previous position as "inartful."

OK, so what does that make his current, um, position?

Artful?

I think so. I also suspect there will be a lot more artfulness before this campaign is over. But what should we call this process, this artful spinning of the previously inartful?

Artfulizing?

Why not? While there seems to be no such word as "artfulizing," it's logically consistent with "awfulizing."

And if Obama isn't an awfully awesome artfulizer, then who is?

MORE: Hot Air questions the timing of Obama's artfulizing of the inartful:

Suddenly, with the general election looming, Obama discovers that his campaign's statement was inartful. This seems rather puzzling, because before he ran for public office, Barack Obama was supposed to be a Constitutional law expert. One might expect the "inartful" excuse on wetlands reclamation or some other esoteric matter of public policy, but the Constitution is what he supposedly studied at Columbia and Harvard. One has to wonder whether Obama has any competence even in his own chosen field to have seven months go by before realizing that he got the Constitutional question wrong.

[...]

We used to call John Kerry a flip-flopper for his enbarrassing quote on his opposition to Iraq war funding. Obama has now changed position on almost every key position in this election, and exposed himself as incompetent as a Constitutional law analyst as well. Democratic superdelegates may want to rethink their position on this nomination before Obama changes his party registration, too.

That would be waaay awesome!

Via Glenn Reynolds, who gives Obama the benefit of the doubt and blames the (presumably inartful) staff.