"what went wrong" with the Obama admin-- from someone on the Left

From David Bromwich in Harpers from June...

“…this president deserves a kind of criticism he has seldom received. Yet we are held back by an admonitory intuition. His predecessor was worse, and his successor most likely will also be worse.”

Give Harpers credit. They are relatively real Left-wingers. Not a fan of crony capitalism. Unafraid to bash a “liberal” President. 

The primary impediment to honesty, candor and principle over pragmatism—for partisans in both major political parties? They value power over policy; pragmatism of the lesser of two evils over renouncing evil. 

If you don’t join in the critiques of Bush and Obama, then your interests are too narrow to say much; you’re not paying attention; your standards are too low; or you’re a poser on matters of significant political principle.

On Obama’s penchant for speaking over action-- or his passion for political campaigns over political leadership...

Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the man. He has spoken more words, perhaps, than any other president; but to an unusual extent, his words and actions float free of each other…He understands [words] as a relevant form of action — almost, at times, a substitute for action…

One of the least controversial things you can say about Barack Obama is that he campaigned better than he has governed...

Winning has always been important to Obama…Alongside this trait, he has exhibited a peculiar avoidance of the business of politics…Of our recent presidents, only Eisenhower revealed a comparable distaste…He intensely dislikes the rituals of keeping company with lesser lawmakers, even in his own party…

Obama had vowed to order the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as soon as he became president. He did give the order. But as time passed and the prison didn’t close of its own volition, the issue lost a good deal of attraction for him...as recently as March of this year, Obama spoke as if the continued existence of the prison were an accident that bore no relation to his own default…

Obama’s domestic policy has, for the most part, exhibited a pattern of intimation, postponement, and retreat. The president and his handlers like to call it deliberation. A fairer word would be “dissociation”…

[We should] ask what impression his spoken words have made in his presidency...He employs a correct and literate diction (compared with George W. Bush) and is a polite and careful talker (compared with Bill Clinton), but by the standard of our national politics Obama is uncomfortable and seldom better than competent in the absence of a script...Obama has a fondness for ceremonial occasions where the gracious quip or the ironic aside may be the order of the day, and he is deft at handling them. As for his mastery in delivering a rehearsed speech, the predecessor he most nearly resembles is Ronald Reagan…he admired Reagan for his ability to change the mood of the country…Astonishingly, Obama seems to have believed, on entering the White House, that his power as an interpreter of the American dream was on the order of Reagan’s…

On the excuse-making that Obama was burdened by the Bush legacy…

He came into office under the pressure of the financial collapse and the public disenchantment with the conduct of the Bush–Cheney “war on terror”…[supposedly] an impossible point of departure for our first black president. Might the opposite be true? The possibilities were large because the breakthrough was unheard-of… 

Note: this is similar to Reagan after LBJ, Nixon and Carter! Crisis is the *best* opportunity for great leaders to emerge.

On Obama’s foreign policy and his “team”

The delay in withdrawing from Afghanistan was decisive and fatal, and it is now a certainty that we will have a substantial military presence in that country at the end of Obama’s second term...

Much of the disarray in foreign policy was inevitable once Obama resolved that his would be a “team of rivals”...It was an unorganized team, perhaps not a team at all...[they] met 19 times during his first term, an average of only once every 11 weeks.

The largest issues on which Obama won the Democratic nomination were his opposition to the Iraq war and his stand against warrantless domestic spying…And yet [nobody on his team agreed with him]…Thus, on all the relevant issues, Obama stood alone; or rather, he would have stood alone if his views had remained steady…

…[Like Bush/Cheney] maintain a category of enemy combatants charged with no specific crime…keeping much of the war on terror off the books by employing mercenaries / “contractors”…invoked the state-secrets privilege to undercut legal claims by prisoners…drone killings…