Turns out Obama's not the messiah after all

I understand that people on the left are deeply disappointed in the Obama administration, especially on the eve of this Afghan troop surge announcement, but they have only themselves to blame. Barack Obama campaigned on shifting the war focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, and that is what he is doing. You didn't really think that you'd elected a peacenik, did you?

Even if Obama were a true peacenik, I'm not sure that he could stop an escalation in Afghanistan if he wanted to. The military wants this. Between Republicans and moderate Democrats, there's probably a majority in Congress who want this. The elite journalists think that peace is an unserious proposition. Can one man, even if he is President of the United States, withstand the sustained pressure of the federal bureaucracy and its allies in the fourth estate?

We're talking about principalities and powers here. We're talking about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Obama, and any President, has a tiger by the tail. They all wind up getting eaten eventually.

Ditto on domestic issues. Liberals are furious with the excruciatingly slow pace of health care reform, and frustrated that Obama hasn't brought the hammer down on recalcitrant members of his own caucus, but Obama didn't campaign as the Dick Cheney of the left. He pledged to be a post-partisan President. And post-partisanship means tolerating a meandering legislative process and a certain amount of showboating by people who aren't where you are politically.

I get frustrated too, but I don't really think I'd want my own man stifling dissent the way that the Bush administration stuffed a sock in John Dilulio, assassinated the character of Richard Clarke and won a spurious criminal conviction against Don Siegelman. Do you? Do you want to move along health care reform by having friendly state attorneys general opening campaign finance investigations against Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman? 

To paraphrase Dennis Green, the Obama administration is who we thought they were. Moderate by temperment and constrained by forces they aren't fully in control of, Obama is doing about as well as I thought he could.

Much better than the alternative.