Lessons Learned

Looking back, one of the big reasons I preferred Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton was on the matter of foreign policy. Specifically, my fear was that Clinton, as our first female President, would feel the need to impress the DC old-boy policy establishment with her "toughness" on scary brown people who Hate Us For Our Freedoms by dispatching the military on all sorts of reckless adventures and ultimately embracing many of the previous administration's most regressive counter-terror policies. Obama, my reasoning went, by virtue of his cross-cultural identity would be a more likely individual to challenge the sclerotic culture of American Exceptionalism that has dominated our policy discussions since the end of the Cold War, and his experience as a professor of constitutional law would give him the cover he would need to start to unravel the ugliest extrajudicial elements of Bush counter-terror policy. In retrospect, I sure nailed that one.

---Vitelius