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All one has to do is act like a citizen first, not a party apparatchik or fan club devotee, which means nothing more than this:
(1) If Obama takes action or makes a decision that you think is good and constructive, say so and give him credit;
(2) If Obama takes action or makes a decision that you think is bad, wrong and/or destructive, say so and criticize him for it;
(3) If there were things you claimed to find so horrible and wrong when Bush did them (indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus, renditions, state secrets, endless wars, military commissions, compulsive secrecy), and Obama does them, apply the same standards. As Bob Herbert put it rather simply: “Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.”
The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder makes the following observation:
From day one of his administration, the left has held Barack Obama’s feet to the fire way more than the right ever did to George W. Bush — at least until Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Put another way: the diversity of opinion about Obama and his presidency among activist Dems far exceeds early Bush-era diversity of opinion among activist GOPers.
As Bill Kristol himself acknowledged about the Right during Bush’s first term: ”Bush was the movement and the cause.” One of the first widely-cited posts I ever wrote after I began blogging was about this phenomenon, titled ”Do Bush followers have a political ideology?,” which expressed the point this way: ”‘conservatism’ is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as ‘liberal’ is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.”
Tags: gop, conservatives, obama, liberal, effective, critiques, policy, politics
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