Newsflash: Obama is Not Perfect

I couldn’t be happier with Barack Obama and his first 100 days as President of the United States. He is everything I had hoped he would be—an intellectual titan, emotionally steady, a man of sound judgment—and nothing of what I feared he could be—too quick to compromise his principles, and too inexperienced on foreign policy, making him easily influenced by the human rights intervention-mongers in the Democratic Party. Like most of the rest of the country, I am a big fan.

But, as usual, I agree with Frank Rich, who has found the one area where Obama may be vulnerable: he could become a victim of his own success. Because of the lack of opposition from the GOP, and because of all the Obama hagiography going on right now, Obama must be extremely vigilant about checking his ego at the Oval Office door. I trust that Obama will learn quickly if he makes the mistake of drinking his own Kool-Aid. But Rich rightly worries when he writes:

We need more than one functioning party, not just to ensure checks and balances and pitch in ideas at a time of crisis, but to temper this president’s sporadic bursts of overconfidence and triumphalist stagecraft. No one is perfect. We must remember that there is also an Obama who gave us “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” a faux presidential seal and a convention speech delivered before what Sarah Palin rightly mocked as “Styrofoam Greek columns” hauled out of a “studio lot.”

And, speaking of checks and balances, I’ve stumbled upon something Obama has done that, in my mind, is pretty troubling. Obama, the former constitutional law professor, has been issuing signing statements—that most pernicious of practices that epitomizes all that was wrong with the Bush-era imperial presidency. And they have not been the kind of benign signing statements that Presidents have always used to simply clarify ambiguous sections of laws that they are about to sign. He seems to be trying to make real end-runs around Congress. His actions expressly contradict the promises he made on the campaign trail about signing statements.

Although I trust Obama not to use signing statements as egregiously as Mr. Bush used them, I’m quite certain that America will not be so fortunate as to always have someone as clear-headed as Obama sitting in the White House. It rests on his shoulders to nip the practice of signing statements in the bud, or else Bush’s executive power grab could become permanent. Arlen Specter, in an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books entitled The Need to Role Back Presidential Power Grabs, points out some other instances in which Obama has been suspect on this issue of executive power. Notably, Obama’s reassertion of the “state secrets” privilege to block lawsuits against warrantless wiretapping is worth a raised eyebrow or two.

Obama is such a clear upgrade over Mr. Bush that it’s hard to muster much criticism of him. But let’s not forget that Obama is a politician, and politicians practice…politics. It’s a dirty game, and the players are well known to be fallible human beings who tend not to make their best decisions when showered with too much praise, power, and trust.