> Obama during his candidacy was the most opposed to this cloak and dagger stuff
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.
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.