The Bush playbook.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Comment - Similarities between Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama - Essay

It's hard to imagine what it's like for President Obama, constitutional law professor, former community organizer, and the political leader who carried Americans' hopes for a more progressive future into the White House.

In his first inaugural address, before an elated crowd, Obama made the case that, in electing him, Americans had "chosen hope over fear," and taken a step toward "a better history." He declared, "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." The crowd cheered as the helicopter carrying George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lifted off, bringing to a close, it seemed, a dark chapter in our nation's life.

Now, almost five years later, Obama still seems to be reading from the Bush playbook.

Choosing safety over our ideals, the President has continued to pursue an amorphous war on terror, a morally repugnant assassination doctrine, a massive data-collection and domestic spying operation that exceeds the Bush Administration's wildest dreams, and a flouting of international and constitutional law that ought to make any small-d-democrat--let alone a constitutional law scholar--blush.

In many ways, President Obama has disappointed progressives.

In his second inaugural address, the President declared, "We, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it." He added: "We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American."

But we have seen no bold anti-poverty measures from this Administration. Inequality continues to grow. And Obama handed over the country's economy to the same Wall Street insiders who wrecked it.

Not coincidentally, Wall Streeters bankrolled Obama's first campaign. It's no surprise that their hammerlock on the economy has not diminished on his watch.

Obama has so far failed to respond to the threat of climate change, even after saying, in his second inaugural, that "the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations."

In this issue, we have an article on a Canadian whistleblower who uncovered the sheer shoddiness of the Keystone Pipeline (page 29), an environmental disaster just waiting for the Obama Administration to make it happen.

But the constitutional law questions, and the perpetuation of Bush's doctrine of perpetual war, are surely the most jarring examples of cognitive dissonance between the...