President Obama has shown his heart is in the right place on certain issues, such as the need to fix this country's extraordinarily dysfunctional health care system. That his efforts have not been unmixedly successful (to put it kindly) doesn't change the fact that he has attempted to make things better.
On the other hand, Obama has been a profound disappointment on key issues: climate change (his silence has been deafening), alternative/renewable energy research, personal privacy, and the prosecution of the so-called war on terror. On the latter subject, not only has Obama continued to emphasize military rather than judicial "solutions" (a sarcastic reference to his fondness for assassination-by-drone), but he has shown a deeply disturbing contempt for the Constitutional protections afforded to U.S. citizens, however odious their views. I don't care if you do believe a citizen threatens the existence of the United States: that citizen first must be arrested, tried and convicted before you can execute him. If he's too damned dangerous for you to follow the well-established rule of law, Mr. President, you have an obligation to explain to the rest of us why. Otherwise you are nothing but a crime boss elected to public office.
I'm no conspiracy theorist but I can certainly understand the visceral fear some people have that Obama is the very embodiment of Big Brother. He's not turning the country socialist, he's doing something even worse: he's turning the presidency into a kingship. Nixon's enemies list has morphed into Obama's hit list. Yet where Nixon had to resort to clandestine burglary, an act whose illegality would cost him the presidency and his reputation, Obama's got the military and the CIA ticking off names on that list almost in full public view. Did anybody four years ago imagine this would be the state of affairs today? I sure as hell didn't.
Obama's a smart man. A part of me wonders just how bad the classified intelligence reports he's receiving must be for him to be acting as imperially as he is. A part of me, in other words, wants to believe his heart is in the right place on national security, too.
But much more of me wonders just why in the hell such a smart man, who also is no slouch as a communicator, can't explain clearly and concisely (and without compromising national security) just why he looks much more like our recent national nightmare, George W. Bush, than even George W. Bush did.
My disenchantment with Obama's unexpectedly authoritarian instincts (in addition to his enthusiasm for drones as an instrument of foreign policy, he has misspent considerable federal resources on a pointless crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, and his deeply misguided obsession with secrecy led pretty much directly to the Wikileaks fiasco) makes me his worst nightmare as a voter: I'm a reliable Democrat who is so pissed at his mishandling of a variety of issues, I'm actively looking for reasons not to vote for him.
And yet, I'll be voting for him in November.
Why?
Because Mitt Romney, while the least objectionable and most electable of the major Republican candidates this time around, is still a scarier prospect than another four years of Obama. If I hadn't been convinced of that before, his choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate would have pushed me off the fence in a scalding hurry.
The Republicans should have had this race sewed up. Obama's facing the worst economy in decades and tremendous disappointment among much of his base.
Yet the Republican primary process, by relentlessly squeezing out the last drops of suspect moderation from every single candidate, resulted in an image of the party and its standard bearer that is, well, scary. Scary in the way Rasputin was. Get past Romney's suits and professional candidate's smile (and his ridiculously unconvincing attempts to look and sound like just an aw-shucks kind of guy), and you can see the crazily inconsistent yet infuriated, burn-the-whole-place-down, anti-D.C. irrationality of the Tea Party and die-hard libertarians (who are not one and the same). Even if you believe the would-be czar might have the goods (and in Romney's case I remain deeply skeptical), you can't help seeing that he's in thrall to a crazy-eyed zealot, or in this case, a whole bunch of them.
And it scares the crap out of you.
It scares the crap out of me, anyway.
Republicans' embrace of the most reactionary, intolerant, and fantastically greedy elements of the far right over the past three decades has allowed Obama to make a real fight out of this election.
Because however bad the Obama administration has been, there is every reason to believe a Romney administration would be worse.
Only the amazing latter-day Republicans could pull off such a feat.
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