“Good for thee, but not for me.” That seven-word sentence might provide a good summary of the ethical approach Victor Davis Hanson ascribes to President Obama in a new column posted at National Review Online.
These ethical gymnastics were not entirely unforeseeable. Obama ran as a reform candidate for the Senate in 2004, while his campaign was most likely involved in the leaking of the sealed divorce records of both his primary- and general-election opponents. As a senator, he characterized recess appointments as tainted, only as president to make just such appointments — some of which later were declared unconstitutional in a unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Senator Obama employed filibusters to block judicial appointments; President Obama now condemns as bad-faith partisans any who might follow his own former custom. He championed public campaign financing before he became the first general-election presidential candidate since the program was enacted to opt out of it. President Obama has railed against any who would vote against raising the debt ceiling as putting partisanship ahead of the national interest — which, as senator, he himself had done. He ran in 2008 on the excesses of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, and then as president embraced or even expanded almost all of the very programs he had so adroitly demagogued in his campaign.
One of the legacies of the Obama administration is presidential ethics as an entirely relative, abstract concept. Obama’s morality is to be judged by his professed aims, not his actual means of achieving them, thereby turning classical Aristotelian ethics on its head: Dreaming of doing the right thing becomes more important than actually doing it while awake. Apparently reporters who had their phones monitored are to be impressed that Obama is advocating a shield law to protect them from any future president not so ethical as Obama.
The problem, however, is not just that Obama’s declarations of moral intent are deemed more important than his concrete behavior, but also that his moral pieties serve as a psychological mechanism that offers exemption for his unethical conduct.
