![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/46\/2011\/12\/Obama-Sad.jpg\" "\\"Barack")
<\/a>Ironically, the roots of Obama\u2019s failure do lay in the Bush administration \u2014 but not in the way progressives think. \u00a0It was not so much the Bush administration, as it was liberal hatred<\/em> of the Bush administration, that set Obama up for failure.<\/p>\nThroughout the eight years of the Bush administration, it was almost an article of faith on the Hard Left that anything the dreaded \u201cKing George\u201d decreed was not only unwise and unnecessary, but immoral, irrational, and probably illegal, motivated not by cold facts and prudence but by cowboy-ish jingoism, the profits of the military-industrial complex and an enduring theocratic impulse. \u00a0With foreign policy, military actions, homeland security, and the economy, there was precious little need for careful examination of the rationale for Bush administration decisions. \u00a0If Bush did it, it was foolish and probably criminal, because Bush was not motivated by reason and love for country but by greed and war-lust and a crude evangelical superstitions.<\/p>\n
So what do you do when your liberal savior extends and even expands the great majority of those policies?<\/p>\n
Consider all the ways in which the Obama administration has continued the policies of the Bush administration, even policies that liberals, including Obama himself, excoriated when Bush was President. \u00a0Obama sought to repeat the success of the Iraq Surge with an Afghanistan Surge, and ramped up the kind of drone strikes (not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but even in places like Yemen<\/a>) that liberals once lamented. \u00a0Where the Left once mocked Bush\u2019s Freedom Agenda in the Middle East, the Arab Spring has indeed blossomed, and the Obama administration has been no less interventionist that their predecessors, though they\u2019ve been able to stand behind national rebels in a manner similar to the initial Bush incursion into Afghanistan (with similarly ambiguous results so far). \u00a0And for all the talk of a \u201creset\u201d in diplomatic relations, the early Obama overtures to our enemies produced no significant results \u2014 the kumbaya strategy got us nowhere \u2014 and the same tensions and disputes have reasserted themselves with Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and many other nations. \u00a0Thus writers at The Nation <\/em>claim<\/a> \u201cthe Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.\u201d<\/p>\n On homeland defense and civil freedoms, the Obama administration has defended warrantless wiretapping<\/a> and continued\u00a0extraordinary renditions<\/a>. \u00a0In spite of the campaign promises, Guantanamo is still open. \u00a0The most severe of the Enhanced Interrogation techniques had already been discontinued, and as one CIA official says<\/a>, \u201cthe incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations.\u201d \u00a0The same programs that the Obama campaign had once attacked where \u201call picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.\u201d \u00a0The Obama administration not only endorsed the once-reviled Patriot Act, but they\u2019ve extended the national surveillance apparatus and increased<\/a> government power to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial. \u00a0So progressives complain<\/a> that \u201cObama has maintained or expanded all civil rights violations Bush started.\u201d<\/p>\n Even on the economy, Bush cut taxes in the midst of an economic slowdown, and Obama has essentially done the same \u2014 ont only extending the Bush tax cuts but adding other, non-income-tax cuts (payroll tax cuts, Making Work Pay tax cuts, etc.). \u00a0Obamacare will bring tax increases in 2018, but thus far Obama speaks of raising taxes on the rich while in fact he\u2019s not yet done so. \u00a0All rhetoric aside, even Obama recognizes that raising taxes in the midst of a recession, at least in most tax brackets, is a bad idea. \u00a0And there are other examples. \u00a0Much though Obama likes to take credit for pulling the economy back from the precipice, the economy had already drawn back from the precipice by the time he came to office, and Obama not only continued many of the policies from the Bush economic team, he kept much of the team in place. \u00a0The corporate, capital gains and dividend rates have all remained the same. \u00a0And the same banks and trading houses that were discovered to be dangerously large in the 2008 financial meltdown are now larger than ever and turning massive profits again.<\/p>\n There are exceptions, of course, with Obamacare being the biggest. \u00a0Yet even Obamacare is not the single-payer, nationalized plan that liberals (including Obama himself<\/a>) had publicly pined for \u2014 and Obamacare or large portions of it may very well be dismantled or ruled un-Constitutional. \u00a0Obama\u2019s stimulus directed massive amounts of funds to the Democrat\u2019s favored constituencies, but it proved so contentious and ineffective that the word \u201cstimulus\u201d is now radioactive. \u00a0Obama\u2019s treatment of GM was shameful, the Democrat\u2019s mis-regulation of the financial sector has slowed the recovery, and the Obama Justice Department has been negligent on matters of religious freedoms. \u00a0More exceptions come on issues like abortion, gay rights, unemployment benefits (it\u2019s unlikely the Bush administration would have favored two years of unemployment payments), and of course Supreme Court appointments. \u00a0It does <\/em>matter whether there is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. \u00a0But there\u2019s no question that the Obama administration has been far less different from the Bush administration than was promised during the campaign.<\/p>\n What\u2019s so astonishing, though, is not that Obama has extended so many controversial Bush administration policies but the way in which his erstwhile supporters have responded. \u00a0They face (at least) two options:<\/p>\n Both options require the liberal to admit a mistake: either he was wrong about Obama, or he was wrong about Bush. \u00a0But\u00a0the first option requires the liberal to sacrifice his love for Obama, while the second option requires him to sacrifice his hatred of Bush. \u00a0Either Obama was dishonest in the campaign or overwhelmed by baleful influences once he came to the Oval Office \u2014 or Obama, once he came to the White House and had the same information and responsibility that Bush had, came to more or less the same conclusions as Bush had.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, Option #1 comes out the huge winner here. \u00a0So powerful is the partisan mindset that I haven\u2019t seen a single prominent liberal writer take Option #2. \u00a0They\u00a0puzzle<\/a> through the \u201cmystery\u201d of \u201cGeorge W. Obama\u201d and conclude that the contradictions between Obama\u2019s ideals and actions compose \u201ca subtle disaster for all those whose hopes once rested with him.\u201d \u00a0They would rather abandon their love of Obama than their hatred of Bush. \u00a0To put it more sharply: they are so deeply committed to the nefariousness and malfeasance of the Bush administration that they would rather believe Barack Obama a failure, a liar or a dupe than believe that George W. Bush took reasonable actions in light of the circumstances.<\/p>\n For instance, when the Bush administration signaled its intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) in a military tribunal instead of a criminal court, the liberal commentariat cried havoc and accused Bush of destroying the American Constitution. \u00a0Senator Obama voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and frequently spoke against military commissions and in favor of federal courts of a military courts-martial. \u00a0Yet the Obama team quickly abandoned its flirtation with the criminal courts idea and eventually\u00a0resumed<\/a> the very same military commissions he had once decried. \u00a0Rather than reexamine her view that the military commissions approach was idiotic, immoral and unnecessary, Dahlia Lithwick insisted that\u00a0the administration had \u201crevers[ed] one of its last principled positions\u201d and \u201csurrendered to the bullying, fear-mongering, and demagoguery of those seeking to create two separate kinds of American law.\u201d<\/p>\n The same story could be told with dozens of other examples. \u00a0Progressives could have concluded that their earlier opposition to Bush administration policies was misguided. \u00a0Instead they\u2019ve consistently\u00a0concluded<\/a> that \u201cObama and the Democrats have completely sold out by any measure.\u201d<\/p>\n What the consistencies between the Bush and Obama administrations mean, of course, is that there are broad swaths of consensus in the foreign policy establishment and in the economic policy establishment regarding what best serves the interests of the United States internationally and economically. \u00a0There is <\/em>a hyper-partisan paralysis on some<\/em> matters, but on many matters, in spite of claims to the contrary, there is a general consensus (which is not to say that it\u2019s right) on the course to take. \u00a0And while it\u2019s easy to inveigh against a President from the opposite party when you\u2019re trying to get elected, when you <\/em>are the decider, when you face the same intelligence and the same responsibilities as your predecessor, you may find that your former criticisms fade away and your predecessor\u2019s course of action begins to look mighty reasonable.<\/p>\n The legacy of the Left\u2019s extreme Bush hatred, which led them to caricature Bush and scorn and misrepresent the great majority of his policies, policies they otherwise might have found reasonable, has had profound consequences for Obama. \u00a0First, when he takes the same course of action that Bush took, however pragmatic it might be, he looks like a sellout to his most ardent supporters and he looks spineless or unprincipled to moderates. \u00a0They begin to ask: What does Obama really stand for? \u00a0Thus, second,\u00a0Obama lost, quite early in his administration, a President\u2019s most precious commodity: the trust of the American people. \u00a0They no longer knew whether he said what he meant and meant what he said. \u00a0And third, this puts him in a tough position entering the election contest. \u00a0Obama can deliver the same soaring speeches, but soaring speeches swiftly turn sour when the speaker\u2019s actions contradict his words.<\/p>\n\n