White House aides: Obama feels liberated and ready to be the president he always wanted to be

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Allah:

This feels like a threat. But maybe I’m only seeing it that way because of last month’s bar-lowering authoritarian power grab on immigration, with another authoritarian power grab on the Cuba embargo soon to come. If you’re into watching the president take ever bigger dumps on separation of powers, setting terrible precedents for his successors for decades to come, I suppose it’s good news after all.

Didn’t I read this same story a month ago in the New York Times, incidentally?

Obama feels liberated, aides say, and sees the recent flurry of aggressive executive action and deal-making as a pivot for him to spend the last two years being more of the president he always wanted to be…

He’s spent a year nudging Americans to judge him less on legislative accomplishments and more on his executive actions. And now he’s got a fully Republican Congress that he can alternate between butting up against and making deals with — but really not thinking about much at all.

“We were trapped in this debate of: ‘Is Obama helping or hurting?,’ ‘Was it a mistake to say his policies were on the ballot, or was it the right thing to do?’” a senior Obama aide said this week as the final details of American Alan Gross’s release from a Cuban prison — enabling the deal with the island country — were being worked out. “We are more the masters of our own destiny than we were before.”…

“This certainly has been our most productive year since the Republicans took over,” the Obama aide said, calling it, in the context of what happens in any presidency, “an excellent year.”

His “excellent year” involved every Democratic incumbent in the country running away from him and his low-40s approval rating, only to see them wiped out anyway in a mammoth nationwide anti-Obama backlash. You could understand him feeling liberated if Democrats had run on his policies and outperformed expectations; he would have pointed to that, not unjustifiably, as a mandate. Instead, “liberation” to Obama meant postponing virtually every major initiative until after voters were safely out of the way. He saved net neutrality for the week after the election; he saved executive amnesty for two weeks after; and who knows how soon the Cuba deal could have been struck if Obama wanted it done before November 4th. What he feels liberated from, in other words, is democratic accountability, which is not the sort of thing you want to hear from a guy who’s already blazed new unconstitutional trails in executive lawmaking. If this is what he’s doing in the first flush of “liberation,” what’s he going to be doing in the homestretch of his presidency in 2016, especially if Hillary has a safe-ish lead against her Republican challenger? You trust a man who’s reflected wistfully to his inner circle that it’d be easier to be president of China, don’t you? Especially with a sympathetic media cheering on his dubious, just-try-to-stop-me “winning streak.”

That reminds me of something I thought yesterday when the Cuba news was first breaking. One of the momentous but less remarked upon consequences of the deal with Castro is that it makes a nuclear deal with Iran much more likely, no? One striking thing about it, as a million different people have already observed, is how little Obama got in return for it. No major concessions on human rights, no concessions on moving towards democracy, no guarantees that American capital flowing into Havana won’t go straight into Raul’s and Fidel’s pockets. He handed the Castros U.S. recognition of their legitimacy in exchange for basically nothing. What he did get, though, was something important to him personally — something for his “legacy,” an extra line on his presidential resume about how he reopened Cuba when his predecessors had kept it closed for 50 years.

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Obama feels liberated, aides say, and sees the recent flurry of aggressive executive action and deal-making as a pivot for him to spend the last two years being more of the president he always wanted to be…

Like, say, Saddam Hussein.

If he feels liberated, it’ll be to our detriment.

He’s been wanting to close the deal with Iran, he will. So what if the Iranians have been working on nuclear trigger components, ballistic missile technology (short to intercontinental), warhead technology. He’s mulling over sanctions on Israel over apartment buildings.

Borrowing Hillary’s phrase, what does it matter? He really doesn’t care a whole bunch.

Cuba, immigration policy, the U.S. economy… The right had better start pedaling the propaganda machine faster. It appears their lame duck President has jumped the gun and got off to a running start.

Fact-checking Obama’s press conference jobs claims