By Jeff Jacoby
Sunday, October 21, 2012
YOU'RE A PASSIONATE and committed liberal. Four years
ago, enthralled by Barack Obama's biography and inspired by his oratory, you
voted for him with pride. You embraced his promise of hope and change. You were
deeply moved by the racial progress he symbolized.
But above all you voted for him because he expressed such
enlightened views.
You didn't just want a Democrat back in the White House,
you wanted one who would bring progressive clarity to US national policy.
For eight years, you'd fumed at George W. Bush's offenses
against the Constitution; now at last, you believed, you were supporting a
president for whom civil liberties would be an unshakable priority. A president
who wouldn't be beholden to Wall Street and its rivers of cash. Who would
prosecute the war on terror without abandoning core American values or
trampling basic human rights. Whose administration would function in the
sunlight, a jewel of transparency, accountability, and due process.
That was the president you expected. It wasn't the president
you got.
"I will make clear that the days of compromising our
values are over," Obama had said in 2007 as he campaigned for the
Democratic presidential nomination. In an address to the Woodrow Wilson Center,
he had excoriated Bush's approach to counterterrorism – the excesses of the
Patriot Act, the warrantless wiretapping, the indefinite detention of terror
suspects – for reflecting a "false choice between the liberties we cherish
and the security we demand." In an Obama administration, he vowed, things
would be different.
Yet the president you voted for hasn't abandoned Bush's
antiterror legacy, not by a long shot. Since Obama took office, warrantless
wiretapping of Americans' domestic communications has skyrocketed. According to
a new report by the ACLU, "more people were subjected to [electronic]
surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade."
Instead of repealing the Patriot Act, Obama signed a law extending it through
2015.
The president who was going to shut the US lockup at
Guantanamo is now spending millions of dollars to upgrade it. Far from doing
away with trials by military commission, he ordered them resumed. The eloquent
progressive who vowed to roll back Bush's post-9/11 wartime excesses has become
almost a caricature of what he used to condemn. He meets regularly to review a
"kill list" of terrorist suspects and decide who should be targeted
for death. He has drastically expanded the drone war that Bush began, raining
down missiles on countries where we aren't at war, killing or maiming hundreds
of innocent victims in the process. Astonishingly, he has even claimed – and
exercised -- the power to order the extrajudicial killing of American
citizens he believes to be terrorist operatives.
Neocon hawks may not blink at such things, but
conscientious liberals like you were always appalled by them. "We have
compromised our most precious values," Obama said as a candidate. Will you
compromise your values by voting for him again?
And what about all those other values you counted on
Obama to uphold?
On the campaign trail, his top priority was to codify Roe
v. Wade. "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of
Choice Act," he declared. Once in office, it dropped from his agenda.
You trusted Obama when he said his administration would
be "the most open and transparent in history." Instead it launched an
unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers and leaks, and retreated into a
"bubble of non-accountability."
When you voted for Obama in 2008, could you have imagined
that he would extend the Bush tax cuts? That he would commit US forces to war
in Libya without the congressional approval he himself had said the law
required? That he would show so little concern for pro-democracy dissidents and
protesters resisting tyranny? That he would expel 1.2 million undocumented
immigrants in three years, more than any president since the 1950s? That he
would load his administration with so many former lobbyists – after having
promised that he wouldn't?
If a Republican president compiled such an atrocious
record, you would do everything you could to prevent his reelection. Can you
vote in good conscience for a Democrat with such a record?
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