Bipartisan Terror Policy

by digby

Here’s some good news for President Obama. The villagers have decided that he’s getting terrorist policy juuuuust right. Dick Cheney and his pals on the right believe in torture and no due process at all while the “far left” believes that torture is immoral and everyone is entitled to basic human rights, so the proper course is to split the difference and only rip up half the constitution instead of the whole thing.

Last night’s Lehrer News Hour was a Goldilocks Festival:

DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: [M]y main point is that the policy that George Bush had in the second term is very, very, very close to the policy Barack Obama has right now. We have a bipartisan policy on terror these days.

If you look at the individual issues of rendition, habeas corpus, the secret prisons, Obama has taken the Bush policy, made some adjustments, mostly minor, and then co-opted it. We have a bipartisan policy. My problem is nobody could admit that fact.

Barack Obama can’t admit to the Democratic Party that he took George Bush’s policy, and Dick Cheney wants to pretend that Barack Obama has made this vast departure so he can pretend that somehow we’re less safe.

[…]

DAVID BROOKS: But we stopped torturing people — we stopped waterboarding people in — I think it’s March or certainly winter 2003. That’s a long time ago.

What happened was, in the first years of the Bush administration, right after 9/11, they did a lot of stuff, but those policies were morally offensive and unsustainable. And people like Steve Hadley and Condoleezza Rice reined them in.

And you had an evolution over 2003, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, and ’08 moving away from the policies that Dick Cheney now celebrates to a whole set of different policies, which are close to what Obama celebrates.

And I talked to some Bush people yesterday, and they said that the Cheney speech was very familiar to them. He’s been making all those arguments within the Bush White House, while he was losing the arguments, and now he made them publicly.

And so I do think what Obama did — very politically astutely, I guess, though not quite honestly — was to pretend 2002, 2003, the Bush-Cheney era, was the entire Bush era, and it wasn’t. And so he sort of had a little political sleight of hand.

But the good news is — and this is Obama’s major accomplishment — and Mark did mention this — is that, first of all, he took some sensible policies the professionals in the field really believe in. And he did something George Bush would never do, which is, A, to build a framework around them so they’re sustainable and coherent and then, most importantly, to explain them to people.

The Bush had this vast evolution in policy, but Bush didn’t care what people thought so he never explained them to people, would never admit he was changing course. Obama explained them and made them credible, and that’s a big improvement.

Apparently, the change people voted for in 2008 for wasn’t change from Republican policies per se, but rather change from Dick Cheney’s policies of 2001 to 2004.

Let the rehabilitation of Bush begin:

MARK SHIELDS: … Now, the president has also said — and I think with some validity — that Vice President Cheney was driven to speak — and I think David’s right, he’s not speaking for the Republicans — he was speaking as much against the policies that changed in the Bush administration in the second — in defense of those that he had argued and for which he ultimately paid a certain price socially and powerfully in the administration itself.

In the spirit of post-partisan comity, maybe Bush and Obama can build a joint presidential library.

Shields went on to call the democrats the “bedwetter caucus” on this issue and praised Obama for assuring them that he would protect the constitution because he had his speech at the National Archives. Brooks was equally fulsome in his praise of Obama’s willingness to “make the hard call” to continue renditions and preventive detention, which is a very adult thing to do.

This idea that Obama is continuing the second Bush term is something Democrats should be very wary about signing on to:

Now for some reason it’s become fashionable to say that the last election wasn’t about national Security, which is complete nonsense. Economics was barely on the radar until the summer, when gas prices soared, and aside from health care, the bigger economic issues weren’t even discussed until October. Obama won the nomination largely on the basis of his Iraq war stance in 2004; foreign policy and national security issues were the focus of virtually all the debates in both parties. The idea that the people didn’t really know what they were voting for is a complete redrawing of history.

According to the villagers, the people voted for a third Bush term on national security when, in fact, they resoundingly rejected that. But the Goldilocks beltway mentality requires that successful Democratic politicians must represent “the middle,” which in this case means being equidistant from Cheney and the civil libertarians on policy. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is, as long as it isn’t “left.”

But remember, when Bush and Cheney were running the show, they were considered “the middle” too, the leaders of the allegedly vast swathe of Real flag waving Americans who were in favor of invading Iraq and wanted the government to “take the gloves off.” In the minds of villagers, “the middle” always dresses right, history, polling, election results be damned.

Update:

Hmmm. Apparently, President Obama really doesn’t like this Bush comparison.

I don’t blame him for not liking this comparison. He’s smart enough to know that only villagers could ever think that the second Bush term was a thorough repudiation of the first. He remembers who he ran against.

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