I'm pretty sure that O is not a hypocrite. Don't misread that. There is a "not" in there.
But lots of people, especially those on the right and the far left, are accusing him of that right now.
See, I believe there is a distinction to be made here. I think there is a relatively fine line between hypocrisy and naiveté.
So while I don't believe O is a hypocrite, I do believe he's a bit naive when it comes to being president of the U.S.
Summing it up so far, 20 or so days into his administration, I'd say O is figuring out the view looking out from inside the Oval Office is wildly different than the view looking in from the outside.
Take the disintegration of some of his cabinet appointments.
Before being sworn in, O talked about the cleanest, most transparent administration ever.
Nonetheless, I'm sure during the vetting process - and the vetting process is quite exhaustive - questions came up about some of his cabinet nominees.
There was Bill Richardson (Commerce) who was facing a quid-pro-quo investigation.
And there were tax-cheat worries about Tom Daschle (Health), Timothy Geithner (Treasury) and Nancy Killifer (Chief Performance Officer.)
But when these things came up, my guess is O figured that, while those things could be a little testy, they're not that big a deal.
Remember, O is a guy who came out of Chicago politics. In Chicago, owing back taxes is akin to spitting on the sidewalk or rolling through a stop sign anywhere else.
I'm sure he decided these were the very best people for the job and they would be confirmed despite their minor foibles.
Well, not so much.
So hats off to him for going before the cameras and saying - however ineloquently - "I screwed up."
Then there's the lobbyist thing where he said he wouldn't have any lobbyists in his administration.
But before you know it, there's a Department of Defense appointment - William J. Lynn as deputy Defense secretary - who was a big-time lobbyist (Vice President for Governmental Affairs) for Raytheon, which is a big-time government defense contractor.
So O revised his no-lobbyist policy to say that he would have no lobbyists except when he felt like giving them a waiver.
Again, this doesn't make O a hypocrite. I think he just overestimated the outside-the-beltway talent pool. Honestly, the people spinning through that, Washington D.C., "revolving door" O so roundly denounced during the campaign are the ones who know how to take care of business.
They have the experience. They know how Washington works. They can get things done.
That Daschle guy, for example, was the lawyer for a bunch of healthcare lobbyists. (He made a couple million bucks over the past few years taking care of lobbyist business.) That made him "uniquely qualified" to lead the effort to reform health care in this country, O said. Plus, being a former U.S. Senator, he could handle the politics, too.
Bonus!
Darn if he just wasn't a tax cheat.
Of course, all of this stuff drives those crazy right-wingers nuts - but not so much the people on the left.
What's driving the people on the left nuts is the war and terror stuff.
After vilifying W and the way he conducted the war in Iraq, O kept W's second defense secretary, the well-respected Robert Gates, on the job.
And despite all the ululations of the left regarding the war in Iraq - and the fact that ending it was a centerpiece of O's campaign - it seems as if it's going to be pretty much status quo.
With regard to U.S. Iraq policy, there will be little deviation from the W administration's tactics and timeline.
Keeping Gates on also made it a little tougher for O to fill in the staffing blanks in the defense department.
Veteran Pentagon analysts say that retaining Gates hindered the new administration's efforts to recruit nominees for other top jobs in defense.
They say the search for a deputy defense secretary O and Gates could live with took a lot longer than they expected.
And then, when they came up with Raytheon lobbyist Lynn, they had to give him the waiver because he broke O's own ethics rules.
There also was a fascinating article by Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas in Newsweek last month that noted how it's likely that lots of that untoward stuff W and Cheney put into place - waterboarding, warrantless wiretaps, etc. - might just not be so untoward after all.
They write:
"In Obama's spirit of nonpartisanship, the new crowd would do well to listen to Jack Goldsmith, formerly a Bush Justice Department official, now a Harvard Law School professor. At Justice, Goldsmith was the head of an obscure but critically important unit called the Office of Legal Counsel. OLC acts as a kind of lawyer for the executive branch, offering opinions ... on what the executive branch can and cannot do."
When he took over in 2003, Goldsmith began revoking some of the permissions granted to the executive branch by the previous OLC.
Stuart and Thomas:
"The revolt of Goldsmith and some other principled Justice lawyers was a heroic story, kept secret at the time. Now Goldsmith worries about the pendulum swinging too far, as it often does in American democracy. 'The presidency has already been diminished in ways that would be hard to reverse' and may be losing its capability to fight terrorism, he says. He argues that Americans should now be 'less worried about an out-of-control presidency than an enfeebled one.'"
The article also notes that it may not have been so much what W's administration did to fight terror, but how they went about it. If they wouldn't have been so secretive and asked for Congress' approval, they probably would have got it.
Seems likely that the war on terror is only going to change on the margins, as well.
Again, I don't think this makes O a hypocrite. I think he's principled, well-intentioned - and more than a little naive.
*****
After writing last week's column on the U.S. House of Representatives passing the stimulus plan, I told myself, "Self, things probably will get better when it goes to the Senate."
I was dead wrong. It got worse. It ballooned to more than $900 billion and it's bloated with a bunch of spending on government programs that won't create a single job.
