I can think of a few things here.

One is that the early "gut NASA to pay for better science education (!!!)" came out of a relatively junior staff effort from some domestic policy staffers who don't give a hoot about space. If space got a bit more high level attention, I could imagine someone saying, "jeez guys, people may not want to spend money on space but they don't like candidates actually _announcing_ that we're giving up either".

Along those lines, in some of his prominent recent "hope" speeches he's very effectively invoked JFK and the Moon, saying how he didn't let the fact that something was hard get in the way of having big dream, ambitious goals, etc.

Maybe someone pointed out that if he's going to invoke JFK's Moon challenge, he shouldn't also have a platform that says, "space is hard, let's stay home".

What would the *real* preferences of an Obama admin be? It's too early to say, a lot of policy docs this early need to be taken with a grain of salt. Signature initiatives are probably things candidate really cares about, or at least can't back away from, details like cut a billion here or spend an extra billion there will get changed around totally as they pick people to actually fill the jobs during a transition.