January 15, 2010
Jonathan Gurwitz: San Antonio Express-News
Republicans haven’t been disappointed by Barack Obama’s first year in the Oval Office. They set appropriately low expectations for the former community organizer, state senator and partial-term U.S. senator. And with the notable exception of Afghanistan — which he eventually got right — President Obama has met those expectations.
For many Democrats and, especially, independents who voted for Obama, it’s a different story. Obama courted them with inspiring promises to transform Washington with “change we can believe in” and the self-affirming pledge, “Yes we can.” But the Obama administration’s first 12 months have often been characterized by a desultory business as usual and the depressing tendency of the president to waffle whenever he can.
That politicians occasionally fail to fulfill campaign promises is not exactly a revelation. In this sense, Obama is far from being unique. What is unique is the contemptuous way President Obama has broken not one, not a few, but a series of explicit pledges that were central to his victory in 2008.
The most embarrassing example at the moment was his unceasing commitment to open the negotiations for health care reform to C-SPAN’s cameras and public scrutiny. This was the rhetorical bludgeon he used to attack the Clintons and the secretive, backroom deals that candidate Obama said were responsible for the failure to pass health care reform in 1993.
Republicans see the Internet mashups of Obama’s C-SPAN declarations and laugh. Democrats who wonder what happened to the public option and independents who want to know how pharmaceutical companies were able to cut a deal see them and cry.
The shameless guile of the C-SPAN fraud is unsettling. But it is a common theme for a chief executive who is perpetuating “failed” policies of the Bush administration he vowed to undo.
During the campaign, Obama criticized the Bush administration’s legal rationale for the treatment of detainees. “We will abide by the Geneva Conventions,” he reiterated last January. “We will uphold our highest ideals.”
In November, the Obama Justice Department used Bush era legal arguments to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss Rasul v. Rumsfeld, a case that would have made government officials liable for torture, because “the constitutional rights they claim were violated” — namely, the right not to be tortured — “were not clearly established.”
During the campaign, Obama condemned the practice of extraordinary rendition and pledged to shut down the program. In a 2007 article he wrote for Foreign Affairs, Obama said he would end “the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries.”
In February, the Obama administration asserted the same legal position as the Bush administration in Mohamed et al v. Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a suit brought by five men who accused a flight-planning company of flying them to secret CIA prisons abroad where they claim they were tortured.
On state secrets, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, the Patriot Act and signing statements, President Obama has used the language of transparency to give the appearance of change. In practice, however, he has asserted virtually the same executive authority he reviled as abuses by his predecessor.
For skeptics who never bought into the mythology of Obama as The One, who saw through the soaring rhetoric to a conventional if unqualified candidate, this comes as no surprise. For the millions of supporters who were duped into believing the hype about change, it’s a hard lesson in the cynicism of politics.
Republicans haven't been disappointed by Barack Obama's first year in the Oval Office | 
