I want to weigh in briefly on the unrealistic standards set by Fake President Rachel Maddow's address regarding our energy policy and general liberal disappointment with Obama. This is all tied to a larger conversation about the extent to which the president has willingly compromised progressive goals when he didn't need to, or simply failed to live up to promises that he would have been able to keep.
On energy policy, I basically agree with Tim Fernholz and Jon Chait. But on the other questions, I strongly disagree with Jonathan Bernstein's conclusion that the executive's relative weakness in domestic policymaking extends to foreign affairs and national security. Even if it did, it wouldn't adequately explain the distance between Obama's previously stated positions on national security and human rights and his actions while in office.
Here's Bernstein:
Does Obama really want indefinite detention? I think he wants it in the way that he wants to wind down the war in Iraq over three years: it's the best of the bad options he faces, given what he inherited and the constraints placed on his choices by the courts, the bureaucracy, and Congress. To call it "his choice" in that context would be fairly misleading.
At this point we're venturing dangerously close to existential questions about whether any of us truly have free will. Closing Guantanamo is impossible with a frightened, skittish Congress, but the fact is that the constraints on Obama ending indefinite detention as a policy -- not simply as a consequence of funds for Gitmo closure being withheld -- are political, not legal. The administration does not want to be responsible for letting someone go who turns around and attacks the U.S.
Likewise, the administration has actively labored to deny recourse to victims of torture and extraordinary rendition, obscured evidence of military abuse of detainees, refused to prosecute either the architects or executors of torture, but it has turned the full force of the Justice Department on national security whistleblowers. The inefficient two-tier justice system for suspected terrorists has been preserved. The administration has abused the state-secrets privilege to block judicial scrutiny of national security policies with as much zeal as his predecessor. The administration has fought tooth and nail to retain the authority to prevent foreign detainees captured outside the warzone from having access to U.S. courts if they are sent to Bagram.
Sure, the president can't overturn the PATRIOT Act by fiat, but the Obama of "no more warrantless wiretapping" actively worked through Republicans in Congress to expand surveillance powers and avoid the reforms proposed by liberals. Few people on the right or the left see the administration's proposal to curtail Miranda protects as anything more than a political solution to a national security problem that doesn't exist. The fact is that on matters of national security and human rights, where the president has prerogative he has often done the opposite of what he said he would do, and when it comes to matters where Congress holds sway he has actively worked to expand executive power and limit government accountability. This is his record.
To say that Obama can't act because he's "constrained by the political situation" when that situation doesn't involve the kind of serious institutional blocks represented by say, a GOP filibuster, is to deny agency where it is clearly present. The problem is that determining what policy failures the administration is actually responsible for isn't completely straightforward, and I think it's much simpler for people to just call Obama a sellout. But arguing the president is completely powerless in all matters in which he's failed or disappointed liberals isn't anymore thoughtful or accurate than the idea that Obama could make Congress do whatever he wants through sheer force of will.
-- A. Serwer
