The Kitty-Cat Who Roared

The loud reformer Obama himself proves even emptier in his promises than Bush.

By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 22, 2009

President Obama keeps roaring out deadlines like a lion — only later to meow like a little kitty.

Remember, for example, how he bellowed to cheering partisan crowds that he would close down the detainment facility at Guantanamo within a year?

The clock ticks — and Guantanamo isn’t close to being shut down. It once was easy for candidate Obama to deplore George W. Bush’s supposed gulag. Now it proves harder to decide between the bad choice of detaining non-uniformed terrorist combatants and the worse ones of letting them go, giving them civilian trials, or deporting them to unwilling hosts.

Going back further to September 2007, candidate Obama postured about Iraq that he wanted “to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now!”

That “now!” sure sounded macho.

On Iraq, candidate Obama also railed that "the American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We've had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet."

Talk about “unmet” deadlines and “spin” — here we are in October 2009, and there are still 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The reason why Obama fudged on his promised deadline is that the surge in 2007 worked. American deaths plummeted. The theater is quiet. Iraqi democracy is still there after six years. Obama cannot quite admit these facts, but on the other hand, he does not want to be responsible for undermining them.

This July, our president roared out another impending deadline. He warned Iran that it had to prove its compliance with non-proliferation protocols by September — or face new consequences since the U.S. was not going to “wait indefinitely.”

Now it’s October, and even the French are exasperated that Obama still sounds like the king of the jungle but acts like a purring house kitten. And no wonder that Iran and its patron Russia seem to be calculating that Obama will figure that a nuclear Iran is less troubling for him than the consequences of offending Vladimir Putin, spiking oil prices or using force in the volatile Middle East.

The list of differences between what the melodramatic Obama threatens or promises to do and what he actually does is endless.

Health care: The president once warned Congress that it had to pass comprehensive reform by the August congressional recess. August came and went, and now we’re still waiting, waiting, waiting . . . .

Afghanistan: This was once Obama’s promised war to win — the one we had to refocus on after supposedly taking our eye off the ball to fight in Iraq. Now, instead, we are suddenly blaming the eight-year-old Karzai government for not being the stable partner we need to finish the job.

Ethics reform: During the campaign, Obama vowed to end lobbyists in government, post legislation on the Internet five days before a presidential signing, and air health-care negotiations on C-SPAN.

In short, just imagine if Obama were to warn Congress to get health-care done by November 15 — or else; or to give Iran one last chance until the first of the year to stop enriching uranium; or to promise that Guantanamo really, really will close on March 1, 2010. Would anyone take him seriously, much less fret about the consequences of ignoring those vows?

Obama ran on the accusation that Bush missed promised targets and deadlines. Yet when the loud reformer Obama himself proves even emptier in his promises than Bush, he suffers from theatrical hypocrisy, too.

But there is an even greater problem. Overheated rhetoric got Obama into these jams — and he seems to expect that his dramatic flair can always get him out as well. So we all await more of the empty hope-and-change hocus-pocus — as Obama explains how he never really promised to get out of Iraq “now!” or to “take further steps” against Iran in September 2009.

When Jan. 1, 2010, comes and goes, I expect the president to say that, “I can no more shut down Guantanamo than I can . . . .”

Well, by now you know the rest of what follows.