National Post editorial board: Obama gets a lesson in reality
Posted: May 19, 2009, 8:30 AM by NP Editor
Editorial, Full Comment
Reality sneaks up on every government at some point and buries its pointy fangs in the administration's buttocks. Canada's own Conservative government, for instance, learned painfully last fall that it could not act as if it had a majority when it did not.
But seldom has reality bitten down as hard and fast as it has on the administration of U. S. President Barack Obama. Although he campaigned on an unrelenting message of change from the previous administration of George W. Bush, Mr. Obama has in the past two weeks reverted to using most of the same intelligence and security techniques employed against terrorists by his predecessor.
In his inaugural address in January, Mr. Obama disparaged the use by the Bush White House of indefinite detention of terror suspects, aggressive interrogation techniques and military tribunals rather than civilian courts.
Yet on Friday, White House aides told The Washington Post that President Obama was finding it "excruciating" to be responsible for keeping America safe. Ensuring that no terrorists attack sites in the U. S. or American targets overseas has been proving tougher than the President had imagined, hence he is reinstating the military tribunals he had so harshly criticized Mr. Bush about during last year's campaign.
Last summer, Mr. Obama proclaimed that he had "faith in America's courts" to try terror suspects without compromising Americans' security at the same time, adding that "as president, I'll close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act [and] adhere to the Geneva Conventions."
That was then. Now the Obama administration is tacitly acknowledging that the Bush administration might have been justified in its tactics for handling suspected terrorists; maybe it wasn't just a group of out-of-control, law-flouting cowboys motivated by prejudice against Muslims.
On Sunday, Democratic Senator Jim Webb told ABC's This Week program that Mr. Obama's tribunals would be nothing like Mr. Bush's: "They would offer more due process." For instance, terror suspects would have greater leeway in choosing their own lawyers. But the prevarications of Obama administration spokesmen have been reminiscent of that line from the old Western movies: "First we'll give 'em a fair trial, then we'll hang 'em."
Mr. Obama has also reversed himself on Gitmo. He insisted on his first day in office that the detention camp there would be shuttered by next January. Now his spokesmen are letting it be known that some of the inmates there may never be let go and the camp may have to stay open "indefinitely."
Mr. Obama, too, made a great show last year of promising to release photos of American abuse of foreign detainees. Now he thinks that's unwise.
The harsh lessons of reality Mr. Obama has learned aren't limited to national security. On economics and the environment, too, he is finding it harder to intervene than he imagined. His administration has released only 6% of its stimulus money so far. It has found it almost impossible to determine which banks deserve bailouts and which bad assets the federal government should take off companies' hands.
Restructuring the auto industry, too, has proven more complex than imagined. Loans to General Motors, for instance, are being held up because of White House dithering over whether or not to pay fired company president Richard Wagoner Jr. the US$20-million severance package his employment contract calls for.
Meanwhile, alternative energy and carbon emissions bills are being watered down by presidential advisors in hopes of getting them through Congress.
Mr. Obama and his angry idealist supporters were so sure the Republicans before them were venal that they had convinced themselves all they needed to do was show up and proclaim a new era and the U. S. and the world would remake themselves. Reality, though, is proving a tougher nut to crack.
National Post