Critique of Obama

So basically, for all his campaign rhetoric of hope, post-partisanship, and transparency, Obama has turned into the same corrupt, power-hungry, secretive piece-of-garbage that Bush was, right?

in reference to:

"Instead of saying he would let others give him a health plan, any health plan, he should have said that the health plan he needed and wanted was the public option, and then sold it unceasingly as the only means of bringing down costs—which proved to be the central issue in rejecting less effective compromises. He should have used the stick, not endless carrots, on the blue dogs. He should have recognized that he must get results fast, while he was riding high in the polls. Lyndon Johnson said that if a man comes into office with one thing he wants, he should get it in his first six months. Obama frittered away his striking time. On foreign policy, though he came to national prominence as a critic of the Iraq war he appointed a secretary of state who had voted for it, a vice president who had voted for it, a secretary of defense who had supported it, and top echelon generals who had waged it. As if to placate them, he substituted a new dumb war for the old dumb one. He has tied down our troops, money, and resources to one government (not really a government) when terrorism has metastasized across many governments and nations—limiting our response to it by the feckless hope of building a viable nation in Afghanistan. He choreographed a great series of listening sessions, where every general had his say in the White House before he tried to please them all. On one of George Bush’s worst excesses, his signing statements nullifying congressional legislation, Obama has substituted a worse recourse, secret signing reservations—allowing him to bypass certain provisions of a bill—that are hard to trace. He has put off decisions on rendition, on Guantanamo, on CIA interrogation. As if he felt restrained by his own blackness, he will not fight, though the American people love a fighter—Teddy Roosevelt going after the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt mocking the “malefactors of great wealth,” Harry Truman for “giving ‘em hell,” attacking the Do-Nothing Congress and his media foes. Whatever their other faults, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush were applauded when they proved to be fighters. Bush was never apologetic about playing to his base, while Obama has acted as if he were ashamed of his. They are repaying him in kind. During his campaign, Obama’s critics called him a hope-addict, all rosy scenarios and Let’s-get-along and Kumbaya. It is sad to realize, at last, that they were right. Hope did him in."

- NYRblog - After Massachusetts: His Hopes Did Him In - The New York Review of Books (view on Google Sidewiki)