Posted at 12:10 PM ET, 04/15/2009
Obama's Power Grab
Obama in explanation mode yesterday. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

President Obama yesterday showed the nation once again how good he is at explaining complicated things. Next up on his agenda should be an explanation -- or, rather, a clarification -- of his views on presidential power and George W. Bush's counterterrorism legacy.

It's past time for Obama to address his apparent adoption of positions he formerly characterized as extremist, and his suddenly cooling commitment to transparency when it comes to embarrassing secrets left over from the Bush era.

In the past few weeks, we've seen the Obama Justice Department make absurdly broad invocations of the state secrets privilege to protect Bush's spying programs from judicial review. We've seen the administration argue that foreign detainees -- as long as they are being held in Afghanistan rather than at Guantanamo -- can be imprisoned indefinitely without formal charges. We've seen how Obama, after staying out of the debate over accountability for torture and other unlawful legacies of the Bush administration, is now, apparently, taking sides by balking at requests from his own top legal advisers to release incriminating memos.

It's getting increasingly hard to reconcile candidate Obama, who eloquently criticized Bush's executive power overreach, with President Obama. This is especially true because his underlings consistently duck questions, leaving it entirely unclear why he's taking the positions he now takes and what, if anything, made him change his views.

So an explanation is called for from the man himself. And since the first 100 days of an administration are so defining, he ought to do it sometime in the next two weeks.

Supporters who put faith in Obama's campaign pledges to restore the nation's moral authority were heartened by his actions on his first and second full days in office. "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," he declared on Jan. 21. On Jan. 22, he banned torture and ordered the eventual closure of Guantanamo.

Some of those same supporters still hope that the administration's more recent actions can be chalked up to bureaucratic inertia and a steep learning curve. Perhaps Obama has a compelling explanation for the evolution of his thinking on these issues. Or perhaps the president, who has on many occasions admitted that he will inevitably make mistakes, could admit he's made some here.

Every day seems to bring more signs of Obama's retreat from his previously stated goals.

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