Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for Friday, June 20th.

I'm John Dickerson here with Will Salatan sitting in for David Plotz, who has fired himself.

And Emily Bazelon.

No, he'll be back next week, just lest anyone out there just went in horror.

Yes, David is on vacation this week and a well-deserved vacation for David.

We today are going to talk about...

He's not going to listen, you know.

I know, I know.

That's why I feel like I can say it without fear of being accused of being sucking up.

But anyway, the first topic, we're going to talk about three things today.

The first is McCain and Obama flip-flopping on various positions.

And then the second topic is going to be the role of the campaign wives.

Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama had some interesting activity this week.

And then the third topic will be about gay marriage, which became legal in California this week, and which Will Salatin is also going to tell us some fascinating thing that I won't understand.

So the flip-flops.

Let's start there.

Barack Obama, the first flip-flop was John McCain rolled out a two-week energy plan in which he talked about weaning America off of foreign oil, but much of it was ignored because he, one of the provisions, was a plan to drill off the coast of the United States, a position that he used to be against.

And so immediately the Obama campaign came out and said he was flip-flopping so that he could curry favor with oil people and also that he was pandering to voters who were angry about $4 a gallon gas or more.

Then we had Barack Obama on Friday, pardon me, on Thursday coming out and saying that he was not going to accept federal matching funds, something he had pretty heavily suggested earlier in the campaign

that he would do.

This caused the McCain campaign to fall on the ground in fits of woe, claiming that Obama

had flip-flopped.

...