But the facts suggest none of it is true.



Barack Obama did win in 2008 running on a platform more liberal than the one he has pursued in the interim. Perhaps he couldn't move any farther left on immigration or health care and stay viable. But on national security, executive power, and civil-liberties issues, he campaigned and won handily repudiating Bush-era policies, only to govern to the "right" of the Bush Administration.

There wasn't a political imperative to do so. And I'm tired of that truth being obscured.

If liberals are going express horror at the GOP agenda as they enthusiastically support Obama's reelection, it's time for them to own his policies and stop trying to blame them on George W. Bush, or intransigent Republicans, or the financial crisis, or corporate campaign donations, or the desire to compromise, or an electorate that wasn't ready for the allegedly "knighted" Obama.

Barack Obama wasn't pressured to be executioner-in-chief. He asserted himself as arbiter of which human beings to kill without trial, at times far from any battlefield, sometimes without even knowing their identities. He decided to limit congressional oversight and totally exclude the judiciary.



House Speaker John Boehner didn't define militants as all men of military age that American drones kill. The Obama Administration did that.

Voters didn't clamor for an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. The Obama Administration decided to wage it.

An intransigent Congress didn't force the Obama Administration to make frequent use of the state-secrets privilege, or to keep Bradley Manning in solitary confinement, or to keep secret the legal memo that outlines the theory behind his extrajudicial assassination of American citizens.



No one made Obama violate the War Powers Resolution in Libya.



The president wouldn't suffer politically if he ordered the CIA to stop firing on rescuers who rush to the scene of drone strikes, or instructed the NSA to stop spying on the communications of American citizens suspected of no wrongdoing, or stopped turning military equipment over to police.



The American public wasn't clamoring for the naked body scans and genital pat-downs at the airport.



If liberals like Auster think that President Obama is preferable to Mitt Romney, even given all his flaws, they've got a plausible argument. But when liberals who describe the right's transgressions against civil liberties during the Bush era as horrific -- a label that is absolutely justified -- and nevertheless describe Obama as man with "knighted" notions, think his major problem is political ineptness, talk of respect for him, and desperately want him to win, I can't understand it.

Is his manner so agreeable that his actions count for nothing?

If Mitt Romney is elected, I foresee a liberal establishment that suddenly rediscovers the problems with executive power, the alarming precedents being set in the War on Terrorism, and the legal arguments against various national security policies. Whereas if Obama wins a second term, I fully expect many liberals to keep on presuming that he is a well-intentioned man who must be doing the best he can on these issues (given Republican intransigence and political constraints).

It took conservatives until several years into George W. Bush's second term to see that their champion wasn't in fact doing as well as could be expected given the circumstances. Liberals have a chance to confront the excesses of the man they've empowered sooner. The facts are right there.

Seeing them is uncomfortable but vital.

