"How much worse does Obama have to get before Althouse decides McCain would have been better?"

"Ann, are there any benchmarks we can set on what has to happen for you to change your mind? I'd like to set an over-under on the date. A lot can happen in three years."

Writes d-day in a long comments thread that began last Friday.

What you need to understand, d, is that I am plagued by a vivid imagination. It's easy to look at Obama and see what you don't like. Whenever you do, think about what McCain would have done and spin the wheel forward a few turns. That's what I do. I think McCain would have played nice with Congress. And the Republican Party would be in shambles instead of scrambling to get its act together for the next election.

Here's my original 2008 election post-mortem — "How McCain Lost Me". Excerpt, beginning with a quote of something I'd written just before the election:

"Usually, I prefer divided government, but that doesn't mean I need to support McCain. I've seen McCain put way too much effort into pleasing Democrats and flouting his own party, and I can picture Obama standing up to the Democratic Congress and being his own man. What, really, will he owe them? McCain, by contrast, will need them. And we've seen that he wants to be loved by them.

"Sometimes, I think that letting the Democrats control everything for 2 years would work out just fine. Let one party take responsibility for everything. When they can't whine and finger-point, what will they actually step up and do? It will be interesting to know. And it will do the Republicans good to retool and define themselves, with an eye toward the 2010 election. I'd like to see this clarification after so many years of obfuscation."

This goes along with my problem that McCain had abandoned the effort to define himself as conservative. I could see myself voting for a conservative. I would like some good conservatism. But I did not see it in McCain. Certainly, just bringing in Palin was no substitute for having his own clear principles.

Yes, yes, I know. The "clarification" is killing us, and once we're dead, there's no coming back. And Obama isn't standing up to the Democratic Congress, unless he's doing it in some really subtle way that one day I'll appreciate.

It's hard, but I still have my...



... Althousity of Hope.

Obama is like Bush — with purported process appurtenances.

Yesterday, we were talking about the way Obama was keeping Bush's military commissions and lamely trying to make it look different by purporting to add more process. I gave the post my "Obama is like Bush" tag, and I had to laugh when John (my son) commented:

You should have a tag: "Obama is like Bush but with more procedural protections."

Today, the WSJ is laughing at the lameness of the new protections:

Part of the tribunal face-lift is that "the accused will have greater latitude in selecting their counsel." Say what? Enemy combatants already have better access to attorneys -- white shoe and pro bono, no less -- than nearly every criminal defendant in America. Perhaps this means Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 90 Yemenis and the rest will now be able to choose lawyers from both Shearman & Sterling and Covington & Burling, instead of one or the other.

Another red herring is supposedly tightening the admissibility of hearsay evidence. Tribunal judges already have discretion to limit such evidence, and the current rules are nearly indistinguishable from those of the International Criminal Court. The sensible exceptions involve evidence obtained under combat conditions or from foreign intelligence services, which are left untouched by Mr. Obama's nips and tucks.

In any event, Mr. Obama deserves credit for accepting that the civilian courts are largely unsuited for the realities of the war on terror. He has now decided to preserve a tribunal process that will be identical in every material way to the one favored by Dick Cheney -- and which, contrary to the narrative that Democrats promulgated for years, will be the fairest and most open war-crimes trials in U.S. history.

I'm laughing at Obama, but I'm also thanking him for doing the right thing and reasonably tolerant of the way he's tried to save face by pretending he's not doing exactly the same thing Bush did.

Let me quote another commenter on yesterday's post. D-Day said:

Ann,

I was convinced that you were wholly deluded when you decided that Obama was going to be more of a pragmatist than most people (especially his own backers) expected. I very grudgingly concede that you may have been somewhat right. I underestimated his willingness to lie.

(Background: Here's my 11/8/08 post "How McCain lost me.")