By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
The contradictions at the heart of the Obama presidency
are finally out in the open. As a result, a man who came into office hell-bent
on restoring faith in government is on the verge of inspiring a libertarian
revival.
There have always been (at least) two Barack Obamas.
There is the man who claims to be a non-ideological problem-solver, keen on
working with anybody to fix things. And there is other: the partisan,
left-leaning progressive-redeemer.
As E.J. Dionne, a columnist who can usually be counted on
to make the case for Obama better than Obama can, recently wrote, the president
"has been a master, as good politicians are, at presenting different sides
of himself to different constituencies. In 2008, he was the man who would bring
us together by overcoming the deep mistrust between red and blue America and
the champion of progressive change, the liberal answer to Ronald Reagan."
The dilemma for Obama is that neither is panning out
because both incarnations rely on trust. The president never had much trust
among Republicans, and he lost what he had when he opted to steamroll the
stimulus and, later, Obamacare, on a partisan basis.
Of course, that's not how most Democrats have seen
things. They've seen the last five years as a tale of Tea Party-fueled madness
and racism. The conviction that conservatives are crazy, stupid and bigoted in
their opposition to Obama is what has allowed the two Obamas to exist side by
side. Both iterations could blame the Republicans for any shortcomings or
failures.
Then came the Benghazi debacle. The president's base,
according to polls and what little MSNBC viewing I could stomach, never wavered
in its conviction that Benghazi was a nonscandal. But even if you don't think
it was a scandal (as I do), many partisans admit the administration's response,
politically and in real time, was a mess, casting the White House as deeply
political and not exactly truthful.
Cue the Justice Department, which deployed the Espionage
Act against a Fox News reporter and subpoenaed the records of more than 20
Associated Press phone lines. Obama tried to play the Janus game again, saying
that he was "troubled" by the reports of his own administration's
actions. The media has let him get away with this bystander act when it comes
to things like the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but not necessarily when it comes
to threats to themselves.
And then the floodgates opened. The IRS compromised the
integrity of the domestic agency that is supposed to be the most immune to
politics. Worse, the White House's best defense was that it was simply asleep
at the switch as the agency went rogue -- in ways that just happened to align
with the president's oft-expressed ideological and political preferences.
The IRS scandal is a cancer because if you can't trust
Obama to keep that agency from being politicized, you can't trust him to keep
anything immune from politics -- including health care and, more relevant, the
National Security Agency.
I have some sympathy for Obama in that his support of
these vast data-mining programs might be a sign that he has matured in office.
He naively denounced the "false choice" of compromising our ideals
for the sake of security in his 2009 inaugural speech. Now he's touting such
trade-offs as essential.
Or it could be that, like so many presidents before him,
Obama thinks there's nothing wrong with executive power when he's the
executive. Either way, the NSA story undermines trust in both Obamas.
In late May, the president announced in a speech that the
war on terror was essentially over. In early June, he's defending a data-mining
operation that even Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) -- an author of the Patriot
Act, which authorizes surveillance by the NSA -- is denouncing as dangerous
overreach he never intended.
The idealist wants credit for ending the war, while the
alleged pragmatist wants to keep a surveillance apparatus that has no
justification if the war on terror is truly over. Maybe he's right on the
merits. The problem is that fewer and fewer people are willing to take his word
for it.
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