Sorry, I'm going to disagree here. My generation worked our asses off getting Obama elected, and was really the driving force behind his election (to my shame). Yet, as soon as he's in office, all his promises to us, all his soothing words, all his assurances of change, were out the window. Other than some lame alternative to single-payer health insurance, and (only after major prodding) some gay rights advances, he's become George Bush II.

So what's the morale of this story? Choose better next time? He sure had me and a lot of my very smart friends fooled. Vote? As a generation, we not only voted, we pounded on doors, argued with family, gave major money, made up the team that built his fundraising website, which basically carried the election, on so on. Vote third-party? Well, they're politicians, too. Subject to the same motivations and personality types. Who's to say they won't turn out exactly the same?

And yes, there are good cops and bad cops, but mostly (if you spent time around them, as I have in a professional capacity), you'll find that they're highly trained to think of themselves and their own safety and needs first and are mostly indifferent to the population they are supposed to serve. Unlike quite a few lawyers (at least initially), they are rarely driven by any concept of justice, but rather by power, excitement, camaraderie, and steady pay. Justice and service rank a very distant fifth and sixth after those four.

By the way, if those cops hadn't found the drunk guy outside your house (could have happened easy enough, he could have easily collapsed inside his own apartment or behind the bushes and quietly passed out), it's quite possible that they would have just assumed you were the crazy person and hauled you off to jail for filing a false police report and on suspicion of being mentally ill.

> Sorry, I'm going to disagree here. My generation worked our asses off getting Obama elected, and was really the driving force behind his election (to my shame). Yet, as soon as he's in office, all his promises to us, all his soothing words, all his assurances of change, were out the window. Other than some lame alternative to single-payer health insurance, and (only after major prodding) some gay rights advances, he's become George Bush II.

I noticed this during the two-year campaign. People would ascribe views and assertions to him that simply weren't true. He always took moderate to conservative positions on things. As far as I can tell, he's done or tried to do just about everything he said he would.

My advice would be to pay attention to what candidates are actually saying and not rely on second-hand takes from blogs and poorly-sourced news reports. That's what I did, and nothing surprised me. I knew Obama would be a modest improvement over the status quo, and that's what I got. He was the best of a lot of bad options.

And stop skipping non-Presidential elections.

First, up to now, I never skipped non-Presidential elections. And for the record, and to assuage the concern of commenters elsewhere, I do still vote in local elections (and did yesterday, even).

Second, I did pay close attention to what the candidates were actually saying. See my comment below for an excerpt from Obama's formal 2008 platform on civil liberties, which he explained repeatedly throughout the campaign (and has now broken repeatedly).

My mistake was 1) trusting a politician 2) voting for a politician without a lengthy voting record. So there was no way to quantitatively verify many of his promises.

> See my comment below for an excerpt from Obama's formal 2008 platform on civil liberties, which he explained repeatedly throughout the campaign (and has now broken repeatedly).

"Below" is meaningless in a comment thread where posts swap places constantly. Can you be more specific?

Sorry, I meant this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682813

Yeah, apart from the general aura of "change", the only really concrete things I remember were health-care reform, and closing Guantanamo. At least one of the two did happen, sort of.

While he did run as a centrist technocrat, Senator Obama had indeed made some nicer mouth-noises about civil liberties.

> He sure had me and a lot of my very smart friends fooled.

When I first heard that Obama's campaign slogan was "hope and change", I assumed it was a joke. I'm still vaguely ashamed that that happened in a modern country.

I would never, ever vote for someone whose campaign message is "you're too stupid for my platform to have any planks in it". (Full disclosure: as a resident of california, that stance on voting didn't really have the potential to cost me anything. I'm pretty sure I'd feel the same anywhere.)

Not quite sure what you're saying, but if you're claiming that Obama ran without a specific platform, you're wrong. For example, below is an excerpt from his platform on civil liberties. These weren't vague promises (although he made a lot of those, too). They were specific promises, and he's now broken most of them.

###

Reclaiming Our Constitution and Our Liberties

As we combat terrorism, we must not sacrifice the American values we are fighting to protect. In recent years, we've seen an Administration put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. The Democratic Party rejects this dichotomy. We will restore our constitutional traditions, and recover our nation's founding commitment to liberty under law.

We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live.

We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. We reject the tracking of citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. We reject torture. We reject sweeping claims of "inherent" presidential power. We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years. We will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine duly enacted law. And we will ensure that law-abiding Americans of any origin, including Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, do not become the scapegoats of national security fears.

We believe that our Constitution, our courts, our institutions, and our traditions work.

In its operations overseas, while claiming to spread freedom throughout the world, the current Administration has tragically helped give rise to a new generation of potential adversaries who threaten to make America less secure. We will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools to hunt down and take out terrorists without undermining our Constitution, our freedom, and our privacy.

To build a freer and safer world, we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court. We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years. With these necessary changes, the attention of the world will be directed where it belongs: on what terrorists have done to us, not on how we treat suspects.

[...]

Our Constitution is not a nuisance. It is the foundation of our democracy. It makes freedom and self-governance possible, and helps to protect our security. The Democratic Party will restore our Constitution to its proper place in our government and return our Nation to our best traditions–including our commitment to government by law.

I'm saying that I take the campaign slogan "hope and change" as a direct insult. It is such an egregiously pie-in-the-sky slogan that, in my mind, anyone proposing it should have instantly become a laughingstock, just as if they'd proposed the slogan "we're for good things, but against bad things".

Looking over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._presidential_camp... , there seem to be a few standard types:

1. A statement of some sort of policy goal ("Peace and Prosperity"; "Defeat the new deal and its reckless spending")

2. The candidate's name (incredibly common)

3. An achievement ("He kept us out of war"; "Four more years of the full dinner pail")

4. An attack on the other guy ("Roosevelt for ex-president"; "Are you better off than you were four years ago?")

5. Meaningless fluff ("Building a bridge to the twenty-first century"; "A time for greatness")

Some slogans can fit into multiple categories to varying degrees; "Roosevelt for ex-president" is a substance-free attack, while "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" is making a fairly identifiable complaint.

"Hope and change", obviously, goes in category five. But it's phrased as if it were in category one. The meaningless fluff is usually along the lines of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" (or "The candidate is great!"), which is hard to find offensive. I parse "hope and change" as something like an intentional bait-and-switch, except that it's a one-phase process ("we'll tell them something meaningless, but they'll think we have a plan!") instead of a two-phase process ("we'll tell them we have a plan, and then later we'll tell them we were never going to use that plan").

Exactly. Once you're in office your audience changes. Instead of hearing directly from voters, you're hearing directly from very important people.

Think of all the people you meet when you are president and you interact daily. You meet with hardly any of them before becoming president. That dramatic change in people you talk with daily completely changes your worldview in a way that is incompatible with the American people.

I don't know about you, but I think the President and other elected official should be legally obligated to spend more time with real people at the bottom of the ladder. The president should spend 1% of his time hearing from the 1% and 99% of his time hearing from the 99%. Instead it's currently the opposite.

I'd love to see some investigative journalism done with respect to the demographic makeup of the people a future presidential hopeful spends his day and the demographic make up of the people with whom the president spends his day.

As much as I empathize with you in feeling that our vote is useless in the presidential elections, I would like to remind you that our votes still matter in local elections. I'm sick of people telling me they don't vote because our president hasn't made enough changes in our corporate-driven, polarized, two party system. I am just as disappointed in our government as you are, however, I know that when I vote for a mayor, I am voting for someone who actually can/will make visible changes in my community. Additionally, every ballot contains various propositions and bills, where I am able to vote directly on various tax increases, local law modifications, etc. These are important issues, and I encourage all of my friends to register, if only for these reasons.

I did (and do) vote in local elections. I even voted in our local election two days ago. I agree that local voting is still important, even if I disagree with some posters here who say that local voting has more of an impact on our daily lives than our national government.

The President is the wrong place to focus IMO. My local government is both empowered enough and unencumbered enough that it can achieve things, and as the voterbase is smaller we agree on more and campaigning is easier.

I refuse to give up on voting entirely, but I've focused more on local issues because things actually happen. Hooray, Federalism.

The lesson is to keep voting and look at Congress next instead of focusing on the presidential election. It's possible to fix things; state government in California has gotten a lot better recently due to redistricting and primary reform.

Why vote in someone that doesn't represent you interests?

Because you should think about other people, not just yourself. You have the option of voting for someone who won't shut the government down and to some people that matters quite a lot.

>Vote! Convince others to vote. Every election is a potential revolution, which is why we have them.

How'd that work when you brought in Obama?

Until America adopts a preferential voting system it'll be stuck with a two party system, and neither party will be "revolutionary". They'll be ever-so-slightly off center in whichever direction they hope to pick up votes.

Prediction:

The real test of our generation is going to be whether or not we succeed in bringing government back down to more manageable local levels, a sort of backlash against federalism.

The majority of issues we have could and should be solved locally, for proper values of "locally". The technology we have today could then be used to federate these communities on larger issues without giving over autonomy.

You're kind of misusing the term federalism, I think. It generally applies in the US to moving power back from the federal government to the states, which actually seems to be in keeping with what you are advocating.

(it's strongest advocates in US politics have been people who are bitter about the federal government enacting the Civil Rights Act and stuff like that, so... have fun with your new friends)

Federalism has many meanings, but the basic concept is an association of equals or near-equals who make decisions by established protocols. While the US Federal Government was established in a time when communication could take weeks, by the mid-ninteenth century, communication was near-instantaneous, and many political thinkers tried to convince people that they could give up such a high level of representation in favor of mutual decision making based on systematic federalism. This was the beginning of the anarchist political movement, but it was widely dismissed by socialists in favor of traditional power hierarchies. Perhaps today with our even better communications infrastructure, we might be able to revisit some of these ideas of a more distributed power structure.

The loudest advocates in the US for federalism have been the nutty and frankly rather mean far right-wingers but it's worth mentioning that Noam Chomskyesque anarcho-syndicalism also involves some similar levels of decentralization.

The why and the how matter a lot in making that happen.

Power is so entrenched in the US that it's unlikely anyone will make significant changes from political office any time soon, but we can already see distributed power structures springing up in local neighborhoods that are underserved by their government. Detroit is a good example right now. People don't expect any help from the government, so they take care of things on their own and utilize community space to do it. When things get bad, people really have no choice but to be more self-sufficient and community's oriented.