Liberals and Obama
Obama’s failings: a maturity test for liberals?
Barack Obama has proven to be a grave disappointment to liberals – and an absolute delight – depending, of course, on the week, the issue and what sort of mood the observer is in.
To some extent, this isn’t surprising: at least some disappointment by the party’s liberal base was inevitable. Under the best of circumstances, the actual business of running a representative democracy tends to restrain a president’s freedom of action in ways bound to disappoint ideologically committed supporters: and in many ways these are far from the best of times (the bad economic conditions offer opportunities for progressive change, of course, but they also inhibit action in some areas).
These abuses, as documented by Greenwald and others, have included: adopting the expansive Bush definition of the “state secret” privilege as not just protecting specific sensitive information from disclosure, but as entirely precluding lawsuits seeking to challenge a wide range of abusive governmental actions; continuing the Bush Administration’s practice of resisting all forms of judicial review of the status of some terrorism suspects; and a seeming willingness to go to any lengths to prevent disclosure of Bush Administration misconduct.</em>
Give it about two years…and then, mark my words- nobody is gonna like the guy. Anybody who voted for the Goldman Sachs candidate expecting anything but a continuation of bidness as usual, well, you’re just the sort of sucker politicians depend on.
Keep on asking for the sky and refusing to see the ground, it’s the American way.
