BUSH LITE:

[I]n his new book, "Power Wars," the author [Charlie Savage] makes a meticulous case that -- with few exceptions -- Obama preserved a long war on terror that many progressives in the 2000s regarded as criminal.

This was not necessarily how Obama set out to conduct his presidency, but as many generals are fond of saying, the enemy has a vote. As Savage, a reporter at the New York Times, wryly observes at the end of the book: "One way of looking at this is that Obama entrenched the Forever War. Another is that the Forever War ensnared him."

This entrenchment and ensnarement is self-evident today. After all, Obama said the 2001 authorization for war against al-Qaeda applied to the special operations and air war he launched against the Islamic State in 2014. In fact, Obama was making his peace with Bush's long war as early as Christmas Day, 2009, when a troubled young man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly blew up a plane over Detroit with a bomb in his underwear.

The underwear bombing incident was both a political and policy jolt to for Obama. The tug and pull between security and reform that existed in the first year of his presidency effectively ended then, according to Savage, and a kind of retrenchment began.

The value that Savage brings to his book is in reporting out how Obama's lawyers, who were often the toughest critics of Bush when they were out of power, wrestled with and ultimately sanctioned this retrenchment.

To understand this process, one must begin with the Bush years. In his first term particularly, Bush asserted a limitless war-time authority to disregard Congress and existing law so as to wage the new war on terror. Over time, these powers were curtailed by the courts, Congress, political opposition and some of his own lawyers. By the time Obama came into office, many of the most controversial Bush-era programs were either approved by statute, such as the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act  (which Obama voted for as a senator), or revoked altogether, such as the CIA's use of waterboarding.

While Obama at times gave the impression that he shared the civil-liberties concerns of many of his supporters, he was less opposed as president to many of these programs than he was to the broader idea that the president's wartime authorities allowed him to disregard existing statutes. In practice, this meant that Obama pursued a reform of process and not a curtailment of powers. This rule-of-law critique, as Savage calls it, helps explain how Obama often arrived at the same place as his predecessor on many of the activities and programs that outraged his base when they began under Bush.

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