Liberals Need to Start Holding Obama Responsible for His Policies

What I most want Auster and liberal who think like him to explain is why they think Obama "can't be different ... under the circumstances," and their unsupported assertion that if he moved farther to the left he "would never have a chance of winning." I can see why that would be comforting to a liberal who "desperately" wants a guy as illiberal as Obama to be reelected.

But the facts suggest none of it is true.

Barack Obama did win in 2008 running on a platform more liberal than the one he has pursued in the interim. Perhaps he couldn't move any farther left on immigration or health care and stay viable. But on national security, executive power, and civil-liberties issues, he campaigned and won handily repudiating Bush-era policies, only to govern to the "right" of the Bush Administration.

There wasn't a political imperative to do so. And I'm tired of that truth being obscured.

If liberals are going express horror at the GOP agenda as they enthusiastically support Obama's reelection, it's time for them to own his policies and stop trying to blame them on George W. Bush, or intransigent Republicans, or the financial crisis, or corporate campaign donations, or the desire to compromise, or an electorate that wasn't ready for the allegedly "knighted" Obama.

Barack Obama wasn't pressured to be executioner-in-chief. He asserted himself as arbiter of which human beings to kill without trial, at times far from any battlefield, sometimes without even knowing their identities. He decided to limit congressional oversight and totally exclude the judiciary.

House Speaker John Boehner didn't define militants as all men of military age that American drones kill. The Obama Administration did that.

Voters didn't clamor for an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. The Obama Administration decided to wage it.

An intransigent Congress didn't force the Obama Administration to make frequent use of the state-secrets privilege, or to keep Bradley Manning in solitary confinement, or to keep secret the legal memo that outlines the theory behind his extrajudicial assassination of American citizens.

No one made Obama violate the War Powers Resolution in Libya.

The president wouldn't suffer politically if he ordered the CIA to stop firing on rescuers who rush to the scene of drone strikes, or instructed the NSA to stop spying on the communications of American citizens suspected of no wrongdoing, or stopped turning military equipment over to police.

The American public wasn't clamoring for the naked body scans and genital pat-downs at the airport.

If liberals like Auster think that President Obama is preferable to Mitt Romney, even given all his flaws, they've got a plausible argument. But when liberals who describe the right's transgressions against civil liberties during the Bush era as horrific -- a label that is absolutely justified -- and nevertheless describe Obama as man with "knighted" notions, think his major problem is political ineptness, talk of respect for him, and desperately want him to win, I can't understand it.

Is his manner so agreeable that his actions count for nothing?

comedian wrote:I take objection to the editor's lazy description of " the left" as uncritical of Obama.
Considering the formation of this website and all.

comedian wrote:
Besides bombing civilians overseas, Obama's policies on the domestic front suck, too. Aside from making a pro- gay marriage stance that was as safe and calculating a political move as I have ever seen,