This past Sunday’s New York Times suggested that the current political season might be termed the season of the flip-flop.

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights, and Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, had an epiphany of his own on gun control, and is now courting the National Rifle Association.

Judging from what she said during the last debate among Democrat presidential hopefuls, New York senator Hilary Clinton isn’t flip-flopping exactly, but she is loath to take a clear stand on most any controversial issue. For example, she said previously that a proposal by Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York to give illegal immigrants driver licenses “makes a lot of sense” -- and then said during the debate, “I did not say it should be done.”

All this bobbing and weaving reminds me of a story that Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896-69) used to tell. A man was filling out an application for life insurance, and one of the questions was, “How did you father die?”

The man paused. His father had been hanged as a horse thief, and there was no way he was going to record that shameful fact on an insurance form. So he thought quickly, and then penned this ingenious answer: “My father was cut off in his 43rd year, when the platform gave way beneath him while participating in a public function.”

Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois, served with great distinction as Senate Minority leader from 1959 until his death ten years later. But he did his own share of political bobbing and weaving. His glib tongue and mellifluous voice earned him the sobriquet, “The Wizard of Ooze.”

As Dirksen himself once put it, “I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.”

Dirksen would feel right at home amid today’s presidential contenders.