I think I'm breaking up with Obama

I recently peeled the ¡Obama! bumper sticker from my laptop. I haven’t been feeling that excited about him lately.

Conducting a morally and legally dubious drone war abroad, allowing grossly overreaching spy programs and screwing up implementation of important domestic legislation doesn’t really inspire me to put on my Organizing for Action cap and play “The Audacity of Hope” audiobook at full blast.

Perhaps this is the sort of disappointment we all feel when the first president we really cared about is a year into his second term.

I remember voting vicariously through my older brother when I was 15, upset that I couldn’t participate in the historic election.

I finally got to vote for President Obama last year.

His is the first presidency I felt that I had a part in making happen.

For perspective, I was born a few months after Clinton first took office, and I was in kindergarten when former President George W. Bush was elected (I am proud to say I voted for Al Gore in the Nora Elementary-wide election, though he unfortunately lost that race as well).

Obama was my first president, so his failings seem much more personal.

I supported him. I advocated for him. I voted for him.

So the problems with his presidency feel like they are my fault.

Not that I wish I had voted for Mitt Romney.

He and Paul Ryan would have been a nightmare, likely pursuing the same problematic foreign policy agenda while also destroying the first meaningful health care reform the United States has seen in decades.

Granted, the promises of candidate Obama were always too good to be true.

He was supposed to repair our relations with other countries, fight “smarter” wars, close Guantanamo, fix the economy, fix health care, fix immigration, fix racism.

I am not naïve, and I know the world looks different from behind the Resolute desk.

Sometimes wholehearted promises are revealed to be far-fetched, ill-advised or impossible once you’re actually president.

Sometimes campaign promises are simply as empty as the phrase implies.

But we fast forward to President Obama today.

Though there have been some massive foreign relations wins, the National Security Agency leaks have rocked relations with some of our closest allies and allowed Russian relations to further disintegrate.

Though the technology we use to fight our wars has advanced, I do not believe execution has actually gotten any “smarter.”

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and some United Nations reports have accused the Obama administration of committing war crimes for its abuse of the drone program.

Drones are a fantastic development in military technology, but the Obama administration is using them to play God.

Administration kill lists can be thousands of names long.

Thanks to signature strikes, which are drone strikes based on movement surveillance, sometimes we don’t even know the names of the people we’re killing.

Not to mention the number of civilians who have died due to bad intelligence, bad aim or bad luck.

Estimates for Pakistani civilian deaths range from the tens to the hundreds depending on who you ask.

The havoc that drones can wreak on communities both through loss of life and loss of quality of life — the constant buzzing of drones can cause a breakdown of community because everyone is too fearful to leave their homes — actually perpetuates the extremist anti-American sentiments our soldiers are trying to quell.

Obama has personally ordered more deaths than any Nobel Peace Prize winner before him.

Paired with NSA’s PRISM and MUSCULAR, the drone program represents serious overreach by the Obama administration. Both have sacrificed American citizens’ civil liberties.

Drones have been used to kill four American citizens despite the fact that citizens have the right to due process.

One victim was a 16-year-old boy.   

And whether Obama knew the extent of the NSA programs that are in all likelihood sweeping up your data this very moment, his failure to take any meaningful action to rein in the programs betrays his flippancy toward Americans’ fourth amendment rights and right to privacy.

These are serious concerns made all the more upsetting when we consider the dreadful execution of the Affordable Care Act, the legislation that is now sucking up both of the president’s terms because the administration failed to make a functioning website.

Even when he does something truly in the best interests of the American people, he lacks the follow through necessary to make it count.

Unfortunately, his actions only build on the foundation left for him by the Bush administration.

No future president is likely to be independently elected to correct these abuses.
It will take more public outrage and more congressional oversight before any change can really happen.

Keep that in mind for the midterm elections next year.

­— casefarr@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Casey Farrington on Twitter @casefarr.