By Karl Rove
Our president isnt quite as advertised.
Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.
For example President Obama kept George W. Bushs military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an enormous failure and a legal black hole. His campaign claimed last summer that court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists. Upon entering office he found out they arent.
He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate consequences for a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Nows he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.
Throughout his presidential campaign Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bushs counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year facing increasing violence in Afghanistan Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a quagmire and ordered more troops to that country. He isnt calling it a surge but thats what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.
As a candidate Mr. Obama promised to end the Iraq war by withdrawing all troops by March 2009. As president he set a slower pace of drawdown. He has also said he will leave as many as 50000 Americans troops there.
These reversals are both praiseworthy and evidence that when it comes to national security being briefed on terror threats as president is a lot different than placating MoveOn.org and Code Pink activists as a candidate. The realities of governing trump the realities of campaigning.
We are also seeing Mr. Obama reverse himself on the domestic front but this time in a manner that will do more harm than good.
Mr. Obama campaigned on responsible fiscal policies arguing in a speech on the Senate floor in 2006 that the rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention he pledged to go through the federal budget line by line eliminating programs that no longer work. Even now he says hell cut the deficit . . . by half by the end of his first term in office and is rooting out waste and abuse in the budget.
However Mr. Obamas fiscally conservative words are betrayed by his liberal actions. He offers an orgy of spending and a bacchanal of debt. His budget plans a 25 increase in the federal governments share of the GDP a doubling of the national debt in five years and a near tripling of it in 10 years.
On health care Mr. Obamas election ads decried government-run health care as extreme saying it would lead to higher costs. Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it saying It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system.
Making adjustments in office is one thing. Constantly governing in direct opposition to what you said as a candidate is something else. Mr. Obamas flip-flops on national security have been wise; on the domestic front they have been harmful.
In both cases though we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called the projection of appealing images. All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself. Such an approach can work in a campaign as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected as he is finding out.
Mr. Obamas appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with Americas security interests.
Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.
Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or if he did he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time those things can catch up to a politician.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
