No Watershed Event for Obama!

Submitted by John in Michigan, USA (United States), Jul 11, 2011 at 07:36

Bush campaigned in 2000 against entangling alliances and nation-building, but ended up forming a quite tangled, global anti-terror coalition, and initiating, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the largest US nation-building efforts since WW II. Republicans gave him a pass on this inconsistency, and Democrats criticized him for following in the footsteps of their beloved FDR and Woodrow Wilson.

Showing a similar inconsistency, Obama campaigned on ending the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the GWOT; yet once in office, he continued the first, escalated the second and third, and started a fourth war in Libya. GITMO is still open.

So far, they're both hypocrites. But, Bush has at least some basis for his change of heart: the watershed event of 9/11. Think what you like about Bush's actual post-9/11 policies, events and public opinion dictated that after 9/11, the status quo ante simply would not do.

Obama, on the other hand, had no such watershed event. His dramatic break with his campaign promises seems to have been mere hypocrisy, or at best, a welcome correction to his astoundingly naive campaign positions. So in that respect, there is little comparison between Bush's inconsistency (which was arguably driven by an event that hardly anyone anticipated) and Obama's hypocrisy (which was driven by triangulation or perhaps because Presidential daily briefings helped him understand that some very bad people really, truly are out to get us).

A certain amount of triangulation and partisan hypocrisy/inconsistency is normal and to be expected; but Obama and the Democrats unrelenting outspokenness against GITMO, and unambiguous promises to close it, only to leave it in place, goes way beyond the norm.

Between the two parties, it is Republicans who have come closest to the ideal that partisanship stops at the water's edge.

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