Newsweek: Presidents break promises and that’s okay

Newsweek’s Andrew Ramano offers a pathetic list of excuses for the Obama administration to photocopy and hand out to its critics. You see, only little children and mentally handicapped people think that politicians are supposed to keep all of their campaign promises. But that’s not how the real world works, you simple-minded idiot.

The bottom line is that only Beltway hatchet men and partisan activists should treat every detail of every policy proposal as a promise and then freak out when that “promise” doesn’t become a reality.

To his credit (I guess,) Romano doesn’t just focus on the president’s little blips like his failure to eliminate income tax cuts for seniors making less than $50,000. He does acknowledge Obama’s most egregious betrayals: failure to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months and the indefinitely delayed promise to shutter Guantánamo before the end of his first year in office. However, Romano then offers a pile of bullshit disguised as rationality to explain that this is just how politics works.

Sure, this is how politics has been permitted to work. That doesn’t make it right, nor does it mean this is the permanent state of things. Unregulated corporate influence has tainted the system, but there are ways to reverse that. Not that Romano is interested in solutions. He appears prepared to surrender to corruption (a rare, envied quality in journalists). As proof for why citizens should stop asking for transparency in government, Romano resuscitates Ezra Klein’s old explanation for why televising the healthcare debates would have been a bad idea.

“if you open the negotiations to C-Span, the result isn’t just that C-Span televises the negotiations. It’s that the negotiations change … What you’ll get are kabuki negotiations in which legislative leaders make carefully planned statements about the awesomeness of the bill while staff works in a back room to haggle out whether, say, we should tax rich folks or expensive insurance plans.”

By that rationale, American citizens should permit their government total secrecy. Let’s get rid of all the watchdogs: regulators and the press. Let’s bury the political process. After all, exposing its inner workings to the light will just drive the real action into back rooms and closed-door meetings.

Instead of encouraging more regulation, let’s just stop watching and surrender to the fact that presidents and Congress lie, and since we have accepted that they will never be held accountable for lying, and we can’t possibly do anything crazy like vote for candidates who won’t lie to us, it’s time to just roll over and die.

Romano defends Obama’s worst failures (Iraq and Gitmo) by claiming, respectively, that the president was just heeding the advice of generals and surrendering to a stubborn Congress. But the administration has also offered all kinds of betrayals. It was Obama who decided to keep the military commission system that the Bush regime created to try suspected terrorists. The generals didn’t make him do that, nor did Congress, and that decision violently collided with his campaign promises of transparency in government.

Then there’s the Obama administration’s decision to cover up Bush era war crimes. It has been Obama — not the generals or Congress — who has repeatedly said we need to “look forward,” and forget about the plethora of laws broken by the Bush administration despite the fact that his own Attorney General said that “no one is above the law.”

I could go on. The excuse that the generals and Congress have taken the administration hostage simply isn’t true. Obama made these betrayals on his own, and contrary to what Romano claims, that’s not okay. Lying and negotiating are not the same thing. Governance and opaque deal-making are not inherently intertwined. Bipartisanship can exist, and compromise can occur, out in the open. Presidents can aggressively fight for their promised agenda and win. At the very least, they can say they fought until the last second for a promise that was stolen from them. All Obama can claim is he handed over those promises without causing a scene.

I can think of few more jaded concepts than Romano’s claim that breaking a promise isn’t a betrayal, but merely the act of governance. If we all subscribed to that terrible logic, then the president wouldn’t be held accountable for breaking any oath of office. Why hold Bush accountable for failing to preserve and protect the Constitution? Why try any president for wire-tapping our phones or illegally detaining citizens in prison?

Really, really scarily stupid stuff.