Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire reports:

Barack Obama was accused of pandering to the space set in Cape Canaveral on Saturday.

During a town-hall-style event on Florida’s so-called space coast, the Democrat said he no longer favors slashing NASA’s budget, declaring that the U.S. “cannot cede our leadership in space.”

Obama had previously supported delaying NASA’s manned missions in order to pay for early childhood education programs. Aides say he has now found other means to pay for his education plans.

As you would expect, McCain’s campaign is calling Obama’s switch from a platform plank that cut Constellation funding, which I wrote about in March, a flip-flop. I’m not so stringent about it, mainly because I was asking for the change in platform.

The Obama campaign’s explanation is that the platform changed when different funding priorities were assessed. That’s a far smaller change to me than, say, McCain’s voting against Bush’s income tax cuts in the Senate but supporting them now that he’s the nominee. [Note: this is not an indictment of the tax cut per se, although I have come to the opinion that supply-side economics is fundamentally flawed. If this minor point becomes a bone of contention in the comments, I'll follow up so that discussion can have a better forum.]

Disclaimers: I work in manned spaceflight, and I have donated to Obama’s political campaign despite originally thinking that I could not do so. Also, for anyone coming in on this, I voted for McCain in Alabama’s Republican primary, the first time I’ve voted in a party primary.