Obama: Deceitful
We had early evidence of Obama’s character when he solemnly vowed that he would vote against telecom immunity, and then subsequently voted in favor. And he has continued that pattern, explicitly promising how he would act and then, once he’s made the gains from the promise, breaking it.
Greenwald has a good column that looks at several examples of this sort of fraud. From the column:
No minimally honest or rational person can reconcile the President’s Friday signing statement with the vow he gave during that campaign event, nor can any such person reconcile his claimed war powers regarding Libya with the view he emphatically expressed during the campaign. And, of course, the list of similar departures from his own claimed views during the campaign is depressingly long: from railing against the evils of habeas corpus denial to fighting to deny habeas review to Bagram detainees; from vowing to protect whistleblowers to waging the most aggressive war in American history against them; from condemning the evils of writing bills via secret meetings with industry lobbyists to writing his health care bill using exactly that process; from insisting that Presidents have no power to detain or even eavesdrop on Americans without due process to asserting the power to assassinate Americans without due process, etc. etc. etc.
It would be one thing if these full-scale reversals were on ancillary issues. But these are fundamental. They’re about the powers of that office and the nature of our government. And Obama made these issues the centerpiece of his campaign. These campaign statements are nothing less than vows made to voters about how he would exercise the power he was seeking if they voted for him. To insist during the campaign that Presidents have no power to start wars without Congress or to ignore laws the President believes are unconstitutional — and then do exactly that once he’s been vested with that power — is a form of fraud. And, ironically, it’s exactly this behavior that breeds the cynicism that he has repeatedly identified as the central poison in our political culture. Whatever one thinks about the policies in question on the merits, it should be impossible to defend or justify the radical inconsistency between what he pretended to believe and what he’s doing.
