I like Frank Rich - the way he steps back to afford a view of the bigger picture - but this article, as good as it is, fails to call the Obama administration on its more fundamental failure: it's manifest betrayal of the principles it was put in power to advance. For moderates and progressives, Obama's policy initiatives (or lack thereof) have been extremely disappointing - far more a continuation of the previous administration's ruinous course. Instead of throwing down a clear marker signalling a break with the egregious past, Obama only nibbled at the edges of such things as civil rights and torture, especially in his wilful failure to hold perpetrators accountable, and outright embraced certain other Bush-era policies, like offshore drilling - despite the manifest corruption of the Minerals Dept.
In introductory courses on administrative law, budding young lawyer-wannabes learn all about "capture theory", which posits that for a variety of obvious reasons regulatory agencies quickly become "captured" by the industries they regulate. Lack of effective oversight of such agencies becomes, axiomatically, fatal. Obama went to a pretty good law school, and yet we seem to need to experience - catastrophically - this axiom put into practice.
This - thus far - is the signal failure of the Obama presidency and, unlike Bush, he knew better.
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