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.
Re:The Cheapest Generation
by eli_gottlieb on Wednesday November 06, 2013 @03:05AM
(#6681496)
While he did run as a centrist technocrat, Senator Obama had indeed made some nicer mouth-noises about civil liberties.
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.