Were you watching the same campaign I was? Obama's response to "what would you have done differently than Bush?" was "I would have hit Afghanistan harder." He campaigned on a policy of essentially turning back the clock to the Clinton era, curbing some of the worst aspects but not on fundamentally scaling back the whole operation.

And where were you for the second campaign? He campaigned as "the guy who killed Osama." The guy who sent troops into Pakistan without Pakistan's permission and shot Osama in the head in a midnight raid. And people bought it up. They made a movie out of it. And then pressured him to go bomb Syria.

> How can voters influence outcomes when regardless of the principles and/or promises of who gets elected they end up getting the same policies?

By and large, voters get what they voted for. If people wanted a real scaling back of the military industrial complex in the U.S., they'd vote for candidates who propose to do that. But very few people really do. They might oppose this or that specific program, they might support a 10% budget cut here and there, but the mainstream of the voting populace is simply not willing to give up on the idea that the U.S. should maintain total military supremacy over the world. The cloak and dagger stuff is part and parcel of all that.

> I always get this impression that the first day in office of a new president some guy in a black suit comes into the oval office, sits down across from the president

It's really more an issue of incentives and priorities. At the end of the day, almost nobody who voted for Obama in Round 1 changed their vote in Round 2 on the basis of his failure to close down Guantanamo. But Republicans gave him absolute hell over Benghazi. That's the incentive that American voters create for the President. Even if they support some anti-war or anti-spying policy in the abstract, when the rubber hits the road and Americans get killed, the blame will fall squarely on the feet of the President, and the question will always be: what could we have done to prevent this?

Right now, half the country is up in arms that Obama shook hands with Ramon Castro. They are a lot more pissed off about that than the other half is about Guantanamo still being open or NSA spying. That's the incentives and priorities right there.

Further, have the 'professionals' running our government shown good enough judgement to justify their ignoring the will of the people?

If you remember that one of the pre-Snowden whistleblowers stated in an interview that Obama was among the people under targeted surveillance, then you know that all future Presidents (and some past ones probably too) are nothing more than puppets being manipulated by the real powers (which we don't see). So it's really no surprise that "promises will always be broken" - unless we understand that very profound changes in our systems are the only real solution, long-term.

Ten years of surveillance provides considerably more material, presumably.

1. Before Obama was president, his phone was tapped.

2. He must have said, or been party to, some incriminating things, because that happens to basically everyone.

3. Therefore, he could be blackmailed.

4. Therefore, he has been blackmailed.

5. Therefore, he is now doing exactly what whoever blackmailed him wants.

I have no trouble believing #1.

#2 is doubtless true for some senses of "incriminating". I think he admitted (it's ridiculous for this to be an admission, but never mind) that he smoked some cannabis as a student. He went to a church whose leader said some kinda dumb things. He must surely have said some kinda dumb things. But ... the subset of these "incriminating" things that got out during his election campaign wasn't enough to lose him the primary or the presidential election. There'd need to be something quite a lot worse to provide enough blackmail material to (e.g.) kick him out of the job or put him in prison. Richlieu notwithstanding, six randomly chosen lines do not generally suffice to hang someone in the present-day USA.

Now, of course it's possible that he really did do something bad enough to provide real blackmail leverage. But I wouldn't want to bet on it.

#3 might follow if #2 were right for a sufficiently serious sense of "incriminating". But (see above) I don't think it is.

#4 wouldn't follow from #3 in any case. It does, astonishingly, sometimes happen that people who could be blackmailed aren't. Blackmail is a high-risk strategy; if you try it and your victim isn't playing, it can get awfully embarrassing for the would-be blackmailer. And it's not as if the President of the United States of America lacks the resources to make things difficult for someone trying to blackmail him.

(He might lack the resources if he were somehow being blackmailed by the entirety of his staff, or an all-powerful conspiracy that could frustrate everything he might try to do to expose them. But that would require a size and scale of conspiracy that (a) is improbable a priori, (b) is more improbable given that no insider has ever felt guilty enough to blow it open, and (c) hasn't had all the people claiming such conspiracies mysteriously silenced.)

#5 doesn't follow from #4. Push a blackmailee too hard and they'll stop cooperating.

So: I still don't see how "is a puppet" is supposed to follow from "has been under surveillance". Too many gaps.

Even if the president himself is a saint with nothing to hide or blackmail him over, he has many friends and allies.

With that said, any control would have to be limited enough that those controlled went along with it instead of fighting it - a relationship of complete puppetry would be difficult, as they might decide to go down and take you with them.

They can't. The whole thing is a lie, a farce, a theatre. We don't live in a democracy.