Long article, but an interesting read.
"Finally, candidate Obama promised to bring a new tone to Washington. But since taking up residence in the White House he and his administration have vilified Rush Limbaugh, sought to delegitimize Fox News, dismissed opponents of his health care reform legislation as mean-spirited and obstructionist, darkly insinuated that the Tea Party movement promulgates hate and is funded by sinister forces, demonized House Minority Leader (and the next Speaker of the House) John Boehner, groundlessly cast aspersions on the legality of funds collected by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, charged those intending to vote against him in the midterm elections with turning their backs on reason, and exhorted Latino voters to punish their common enemies.
The discrepancy between candidate Obama's rhetoric and President Obama's words and deeds is not explainable only in terms of the inevitable exaggerations and omissions that characterize electoral politics and the concessions compelled by the harsh realities of governing. Candidate Obama did not merely obscure the policy implications of his principles. He obscured his principles as well.
In 2006, the new senator observed in his bestselling The Audacity of Hope, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." But Obama takes too little credit. For a politician constantly in the bright glare of public life performing daily on the national stage, to appear all things to all people requires a calculated and concerted effort. This is particularly true when one's transformative ambitions are as great as his first two years in office have revealed Obama's to be. By running for president as both the candidate of hope and change and the candidate of sobriety and good judgment, somehow simultaneously a progressive and a moderate, a man of big ideas and a pragmatist concerned with real-world consequences, an unabashedly partisan left-liberal Democrat and a proudly post-partisan leader, Obama cultivated ambiguity about his principles and his policies.
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"Finally, candidate Obama promised to bring a new tone to Washington. But since taking up residence in the White House he and his administration have vilified Rush Limbaugh, sought to delegitimize Fox News, dismissed opponents of his health care reform legislation as mean-spirited and obstructionist, darkly insinuated that the Tea Party movement promulgates hate and is funded by sinister forces, demonized House Minority Leader (and the next Speaker of the House) John Boehner, groundlessly cast aspersions on the legality of funds collected by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, charged those intending to vote against him in the midterm elections with turning their backs on reason, and exhorted Latino voters to punish their common enemies.
The discrepancy between candidate Obama's rhetoric and President Obama's words and deeds is not explainable only in terms of the inevitable exaggerations and omissions that characterize electoral politics and the concessions compelled by the harsh realities of governing. Candidate Obama did not merely obscure the policy implications of his principles. He obscured his principles as well.
In 2006, the new senator observed in his bestselling The Audacity of Hope, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." But Obama takes too little credit. For a politician constantly in the bright glare of public life performing daily on the national stage, to appear all things to all people requires a calculated and concerted effort. This is particularly true when one's transformative ambitions are as great as his first two years in office have revealed Obama's to be. By running for president as both the candidate of hope and change and the candidate of sobriety and good judgment, somehow simultaneously a progressive and a moderate, a man of big ideas and a pragmatist concerned with real-world consequences, an unabashedly partisan left-liberal Democrat and a proudly post-partisan leader, Obama cultivated ambiguity about his principles and his policies.
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