I have tried to point out the disparity between the policies that "Hope & Change"® Candidate Obama advocated and those pursued by "Look Forward, Not Back"® President Obama. Now, a new video by Reddit's "Restore the Fourth" movement highlights those differences. Watch and marvel as Candidate Obama debates President Obama on the proper role of civil liberties in our fight against terrorism:
Congress insists that the massive, invasive, unprecedented spying that they have authorized the government to perform is legal and necessary to stop terrorists. I didn't notice any exceptions written into the Bill of Rights that nullify the rights in cases of terrorism . . .
Arianna Huffington had people in me in mind when she wrote this post acknowledging that many progressives are sorely disappointed with Barack Obama. She suggests that the problem stems from his pragmatist temperament:
I get that the progressives, and the activists, and the young people who voted for the first time, and the disillusioned voters who returned to the polls in '08, feel slighted by the president. You thought you had a special connection with him, but it turns out he'd rather hang out with Larry Summers, flirt with Olympia Snowe, or play war games late into the night with David Petraeus. Face it: he just isn't that into you. But, in the end, it doesn't matter where the president's heart is -- it matters what he does. LBJ wasn't that into the National Voting Rights Act until Martin Luther King and the Selma march pushed him into it. If Obama is going to do the right thing for America's middle class by sticking to his promise to start winding down (for real) the war in Afghanistan in July 2011, and by prioritizing jobs over the long-term deficit, the passion is going to have to come from outside the White House.
I much preferred Barack Obama to be President over John McCain. Obama now has a track record, and I find it highly disappointing. Frank Rich is also disappointed:
It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.I think Frank Rich is being naive, however. I think that many of us who put so much effort into seeing Obama elected are naive. It's not that Obama is still feeling his way. It's not that he's trying to figure out what should be done about health care insurers, Wall Street or BP. When I see Obama these days, I see a President whose failures to speak up and rail at injustice are conspicuous by their absence, over and over. Truly, how long does it take to get angry about the way our military has treated highly competent gay soldiers? Where is any meaningful cost control component to health care reform (supposedly the main reason for health care reform)? Why isn't he forcefully arguing against too-big-to-fail banks and promoting the reenactment of Glass-Steagall? Why isn't he livid when Congress carves payday lenders out of the financial reform bills? When the financial sector floods Congress with 2,000 lobbyists, or when "78 former government employees registered as Comcast lobbyists in the final quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010" to push through it's proposed merger with MSNBC, why isn't President Obama visibly and audibly outraged? When I watch Barack Obama, I am watching a President who is not willing to stand up for the rights and needs of regular folks when those rights and needs conflict with the greed of huge well-monied corporations. He has shown us that he'd rather not take the bully pulpit and deliver a sustained message of condemnation, even when the need for such a tirade is palpable. Obama's absence of outrage demonstrates either that he has succumbed to the power of money to get himself re-elected (or to get his fellow-democrats re-elected), or he's being physically threatened. There's no other way to explain the sharp conflict between Obama's pre-election speeches and his post-election malaise. To the extent that there is yet any "Hope" to turn this Presidency around, Obama needs to make it his mission to tell the American People in every way possible, using every rhetorical skill he has, that our Democracy is utterly corrupted, and there is no use trying to govern this country until we take private money out of politics. Until then, we cannot have any honest debate on any issue and all "fixes" of any problem will be illusory.
Our minds are big bags of tricks, many of them helpful out in the wild, but prone to deceive us in the modern world. Princeton Psychologist Samuel Wang points out that two of our mind's heuristics, "source amnesia" and "bias dissimulation" (confirmation bias) account for the persistent belief of many people that Barack Obama is not a Christian, in the absence of any evidence supporting this claim.