JOHN J. PITNEY JR. In a way, President Obama does match up to Candidate Obama. For anyone willing to look carefully, the 2008 campaign showed that he would speak of civility and unity while his crew engaged in hard-edged, polarizing tactics. After Bristol Palin’s pregnancy became public, for instance, he won praise for saying that candidates’ family lives were off-limits and that he would fire anyone in his campaign who spread rumors about the Palin children’s parentage. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, of course, was busy at the time doing just that, which didn’t prompt Obama’s staff to remove the samples of Sullivan’s writing it had re-posted to the official campaign site or prevent the president from quoting him in speeches. A week before his inauguration, Obama met with a group of center-left journalists that included Sullivan.
And family certainly wasn’t off-limits for Howard Gutman, a member of Obama’s national finance committee, who criticized Sarah Palin’s parenting. After the election, Obama made Gutman a trustee of his inauguration committee and then appointed him to be ambassador to Belgium.
Petty political warfare has continued. Earlier this year, the Obama White House directed an effort to demonize Rush Limbaugh. More recently, the staff has been waging a campaign against Fox News. In the beginning, some Republicans may actually have believed the president’s rhetoric about setting aside “the smallness of our politics.” Now they know that he didn’t really mean it.
— John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. With James Ceaser and Andrew Busch, he is co-author of Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics.
MITCHEL A. SOLLENBERGER AND MARK J. ROZELL
During his campaign, Barack Obama said he would usher in a new era of open government. He attacked the use of the state-secrets privilege and condemned the Bush administration for its lack of transparency. He promised to negotiate health-care reform in public sessions on C-SPAN and post online for five days all bills under consideration by Congress. He also said that he would not hire lobbyists to write national policies in secret and declared none would “find any job in my White House.”
Obama has largely ignored or bypassed many of these pledges. His administration has made state-secrets privilege claims to block the disclosure of information in judicial proceedings; prevented the full disclosure of White House visitor logs; negotiated health-care reform behind closed doors; refused to post legislation online for five days before signing; continued the practice of issuing signing statements; and delayed or at times failed to show the public the waivers his administration gives to former lobbyists so that they can work in the White House or federal agencies.
Instead of ushering in a new era of openness, Obama has followed many of the secrecy practices of previous administrations. Although most politicians fail to live up to the standards that they set during campaigns, Obama emphasized that he would promote meaningful change, and he repeatedly declared that he wanted the American people “to hold me accountable.”
— Mitchel A. Sollenberger is assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Mark J. Rozell is professor of public policy at George Mason University.
WILLIAM VOEGLI The Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez often said, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” One of the problems in trying to assess Barack Obama is that he has been such a lucky politician over the past six years that it’s still hard to know how good he is.
Obama leapt from the Illinois state senate, where he’d spent eight undistinguished years, to the U.S. Senate in 2004 because his most formidable Democratic and Republic opponents self-destructed. He became the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee because Hillary Clinton couldn’t organize and sell a presidential campaign any better than she could a health-care-reform proposal. And he became president because John McCain made the worst of a very bad political situation by running a campaign that had tactical chops but no strategy or understandable rationale.
It’s as hard to get a fix on the president’s political beliefs as it is to get a fix on his political skills. The Zelig-like Barack Obama fit into Jeremiah Wright’s congregation when establishing himself in a black district. Once his political ascent there was blocked, he acclimated to the Hyde Park ethos that regarded Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as having picaresque but morally unproblematic pasts. He fit in with ethically flexible Chicago pols like Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich when he needed to build a political network for a statewide campaign. And, despite signals in 2008 that his time at the University of Chicago had left him conversant with and tolerant of arguments about what government couldn’t and shouldn’t do, he now fits in in Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman’s Washington. He has spent the last twelve months as their enabler, which is looking more and more like a role that will hasten the day that his luck runs out. — William Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books.< Back 1 2 
