Chait mostly berates his party for, well, for believing that Obama would do all things he said he would do, which is in fact a fairly reasonable criticism. Candidates invariably talk big, and then have to do some fast-stepping once they actually take office. As Chait demonstrates, every Democratic demi-god, from FDR to Clinton, has multiple stains on his record, something many Democrats simply refuse to admit, particularly in the case of FDR (generally treated as Yahweh himself) and JFK (the son, of course). Still, Obama talked an awful lot about health care, about “Canadian pricing” for drugs, and about a lot of other things. A lot of people voted for Obama expecting their health care costs to drop by 50%, something that is not happening.
For Drum, of course, his party has simply gone wild. Destruction is the name of the game. If it hurts Obama, it’s good. If it hurts the country too, too damn bad. The country shouldn’t have voted for the no-good son of a bitch. It’s payback time, America!
But in all this, neither man breathes a word about foreign policy. In Chait’s case, it’s because Obama’s foreign policy is simply the policy of Condoleezza Rice and George Bush, rather than the foreign policy of Dick Cheney and George Bush—same imperial presidency, same unlimited executive, same extra-judicial murders, but no torture—at least, not so’s you’d notice. Obama always had a hankering for secrecy—he clearly modeled his campaign on Bush’s—and now it seems he’s discovered the joy of not playing by anyone’s rules but his own. Even the “end” of the war in Iraq is pretty much a sham. Our troops are gone, but we have thousands of mercenaries, plus a near $1 billion Pentagon East installation in the form of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, a very fat excuse for not leaving, which the military will surely exploit to the hilt. And if Obama has ever said “no” to the military, he kept his voice awfully goddamn low.
For Drum, on the other hand, well, he was one of the architects of disaster. According to his wife, at least, it was Drum who invented the phrase “Axis of Evil,” perhaps the biggest “big lie” of my lifetime, linking together three nations—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—who were all evil enough, but who had almost nothing to do with one another, and, above all, had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Drum and his Bush Administration buddies used this big lie to justify the most misbegotten war in American history, a war so bad that even Drum says it was a bad idea, claiming that he only supported it because he believed that Saddam had nuclear weapons, the grounds for said belief existing entirely in the ravings of the phalanx of hysterical right-wingers installed by Bush.
Chait and Drum, smart, smart men. They know when to keep their mouths shut.
