Obama’s Selective Application of “Change”

He campaigned better than he has governed.

When Obama campaigned for president he said he was going to bring change – and he has brought some – but looking at what has been going on in the headlines his tactics either reveal him to be a rookie who’s making plenty of mistakes or a seasoned pro who will snooker his opposition without them knowing it until it’s too late.

Which President Obama are we seeing?

Every president seeks to put his stamp on the Oval Office.  When Bill Clinton took the presidency he immediately tried to overturn “don’t ask, don’t tell” and allow openly gay members of the armed forces to serve – and he was resoundingly beaten.  He then tried to pass the Carbon/BTU tax and was defeated.  Then he tried to pass universal healthcare and, after that defeat, turned to other opportunities.

George W. Bush went for tax cuts, creation of a free trade zone for Central and South America, and tried to increase military spending by $5 billion.  His free trade zone is still not finalized over eight years later.  Barack Obama, by contrast, signed  the largest spending bill in history into law, and has made a big hullabaloo about “torture” and closing Gitmo.  His plans for Cap-and-Trade (similar to Clinton’s BTU/Carbon tax) and healthcare “reform” have thus far gone nowhere.

Everybody seems to be spending their time debating “torture” and Gitmo.  Indeed, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been caught in the debate when she was exposed as a hypocrite on the matter.  Nothing is really getting done in Washington, D.C. except for billions more to the U.S. auto industry (a trend G.W. Bush began in the waning days of his presidency).  In fact, all anybody on either side of the aisle has been talking about has been related to the now unfashionably named “war on terror.”  Even former Vice President Dick Cheney upstaged Obama on the matter.

Liberals and Democrats now accuse the Republicans and Cheney of politicizing “torture” and Gitmo but, in fact, the Republicans never considered those two topics to be political.  What is clear, however, is that nothing further is going to happen until these issues play themselves out in the slanted media we call the mainstream press.  And for all of Obama’s grand moral pronouncements about the “rule of law” and “principles” he has kept many Bush-era rules concerning military tribunals, release of detainee “abuse” photos, and indefinite incarceration of certain terrorists.  These two facts have, not surprisingly, gone under-reported in the press because they undercut Obama’s “Republicans are bad Democrats are good” narrative.

Surely President Obama has to know he was going to stir up a hornet’s nest but he went ahead anyway.  Some would say his moves are examples of his great moral courage but, as we have seen from the examples above, his “courage” is only relegated to water boarding which happened to all of three terrorists and Gitmo which, if he is successful in moving it to another location, will still be Gitmo but it just won’t be in Cuba.  So does he have some sort of a larger plan to distract everybody from his true agenda?  Possibly although support in Congress for Cap-and-trade is fading in the same way that it did for Clinton once everybody paid attention to how expensive it will be.  And if Obama fails to take all of that money away from U.S. businesses and taxpayers he won’t be able to pay for his healthcare reform so that would be dead, also.

If one wanted to be Machiavellian about it one could postulate that Obama knows these big issues will be dead but in creating so many distractions he can still make incremental changes like having CO2 regulated as a pollutant, continue to seize control of banks and Chrysler and General Motors in an effort to repay his union buddies.  If he and his advisors are this clever I must salute his tactics for their slyness.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama’s appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America’s security interests.

Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

On key Liberal issues like gay marriage (Obama is opposed to it, like Ms. California), don’t ask, don’t tell (Obama has made no mention of overturning it), gun control (Obama has said he’s not touching that one, either), and offshore drilling (Obama said he would not reinstate the moratorium) he has ignored his base, much to their consternation.  So what is his strategy?  At best, it appears he is going after the low hanging fruit (stimulus bill, auto bailout, bank takeovers) while his other issues have been overtaken by the “torture” controversy and Gitmo (which the Senate took away the $80 million he needed to move the prisoners).

Overall, I think, the portrait is one of a man who has gone back on many of his principles he campaigned on while creating nothing but confusion, uproar, and anger on terrorism (he is not in favor of a “truth commission” and has flip flopped on prosecuting officials who advocated “torture”).  I think it shows that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing.  On the one hand he has angered Conservatives even though he has caved in to many of their demands and has dismayed many Liberals over his reversals.  If this type of confusion persists he will weaken himself and his party in time for the 2010 elections and possibly create a gap America’s enemies could exploit because everybody is so distracted (politicians, security officers, the press, and the public).

I think had John McCain or Hillary Clinton been elected president we wouldn’t be seeing all of these contradictory messages and the nation would be better off for it but it should be no surprise when your resume consists of being a community organizer and a senator who largely voted “present” on the tough issues during their one term in the U.S. Congress.