Frick Or Frack

A gullible portion of the electorate here in the Homeland and a gullible slice of the entire world expected a great deal from Barack Obama. But anyone who paid close attention to his run for the White House, and who managed not to succumb to the promise of hope that radiated out from the Rorschach figure Obama then was, expected nothing more than a Clintonite Restoration with cosmetic changes.

Still, even those of us with expectations as low as that thought it obvious that an Obama administration would be a vast improvement over what we had endured for the preceding eight years. And, once the Democratic field narrowed to a choice between Obama and Hillary Clinton, there was ample reason to prefer that the nomination go to him. He seemed less inclined to make fast and loose with soldiers and bombs, and less unfriendly than she would be towards what remains of the affirmative state generations of Democrats helped fashion and that her husband did so much to undo.

Still, no matter how low the expectations, it did not take long for disappointment to set in. For me, it began the day Obama made Joe Biden his running mate. It’s not that Biden’s politics is worse than other Democrats’; it’s that this purported foreign policy wise man has no idea how clueless he is about the world or how off his enthusiasms and animosities are. Even after the election, I, along with other Obama skeptics, would still, in moments of weakness, let myself think that great things might happen yet; that Obama was only being god-fatherly with his appointments, keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. That was, after all, the conventional wisdom among liberal pundits, and the will to believe is strong.

But the illusion became harder to maintain as Inauguration Day approached – with Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers and other Wall Street toadies slated to manage economic policy, Hillary Clinton chosen to be Secretary of State, and George Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, kept on to run Bush’s wars. It was in that period too that it became clear that, under Obama, there would be no settling of accounts with the historical crimes of the Bush era. As if that wasn’t enough to cause despair, Obama’s silence on Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza, was deafening.

Then, for a while, it looked like the situation Bush and Cheney handed over to the fledgling President was so desperate that common sense would prevail, forcing him to act in the ways his supporters expected he would. He resisted the pressure. By the time Rahm Emanuel made it clear that the administration would scuttle the “public option” to get its milquetoast health care (actually, insurance reform) bill passed, all one could say in Obama’s behalf is that, no matter how disappointing he might be, at least he was better than Bush.

How could that not be right? Anybody would be better than Bush! It is therefore telling that one rarely hears that faint praise these days – and not just because memories of Bush’s awfulness have faded. It isn’t said much anymore because it has come to seem less obviously true. Nowadays, what one hears instead is just that Obama is better than the loonies running for the Republican nomination.

That claim is unassailable. But it doesn’t speak to the question at hand: whether Obama is still better than Bush.
~ from Obama, Still Better Than Bush? by Andrew Levine ~

Regular readers should know how I would answer this question!