A Team Of Failures (II)
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Keeping Gates in place sends the signal that Obama, who faces a host of hard jobs, is not eager to take on the Pentagon at the start of his presidency. ~David Corn
This seems right, but whether we’re talking about spending levels or anything else there was never much reason to think that Obama wanted to “take on” the Pentagon. This is the sort of thing that McCain surrogates wanted you to believe, but it was clearly not so. Obama’s remarks that he wanted to cut out wasteful spending at the Pentagon could have been made just as easily by his opponent–and they were! As more than a few people noted at the time, Obama and McCain even supported cutting the same kinds of weapons programs. Now before Obama fans begin shrieking that I am saying that there are no differences between the two, let me state that this is not my point and I am not saying that. The point is that no one should ever have confused Obama for a Pentagon-fighting, “defense” budget-slashing type.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
You are correct, but I still find it remarkable the way lots of people, especially those in the right wing media, find this to be a total surprise. They talked themselves into thinking that we elected Dennis Kucinich. I don’t know why this is so, but it has a lot to do with why their attacks against Obama didn’t work; he simply wasn’t whom they were portraying him as.
It is strange that so many people are surprised, pleasantly or otherwise. Mainstream conservatives find it hard to fathom that someone who opposed a particular war can still be generally hawkish or pro-military or whatever term they care to use. According to their scheme, it can’t work that way, so they kept insisting against all the evidence that he didn’t mean it whenever he said things that should have reassured them.
What is more remarkable from my perspective is that these are the same people who claimed to have found all the secret clues to the “real” Obama in his tenuous and/or irrelevant associations in years past and managed to miss everything that mattered about his career. Once you understand that he opposed the war at least partly because he was playing to a Hyde Park and Illinois Democratic primary electorate in ‘02, and then look at what he said in his speech back then, and then you weigh it against the rest of his statements and record, it is impossible to confuse him with the antiwar left. This is why I have never been won over by antiwar conservative arguments for Obama. Many antiwar conservatives have also misjudged him on policy, because they wanted or needed to believe that he was a candidate they could support.
Mainstream conservatives find it hard to fathom that someone who opposed a particular war can still be generally hawkish or pro-military or whatever term they care to use.
Some of the anti-war left reasoned in the exact same way and have also been receiving a wake-up call as a result of Obama’s appointments.