Obama’s Bush league week

Despite biting criticism from both sides this week, President Obama declared Saturday that he is “seeing that the ways of Washington are beginning to change.”

Some of the people who voted for him are seeing change, too.

{mosads}Unfortunately for them, it’s not the kind of change they can believe in. It’s Washington changing Obama and not the other way around, they say.

Less than six months into an administration that promised to be the sunny morning to the darkest night of the Bush administration, Obama has been accused of something unthinkable on that cold January day when he placed his hand on the Bible and became commander in chief.

He’s being compared to George W. Bush.

Obama, this week, found some of his closest allies — those who viewed his election as the answer to their prayers — feeling betrayed and making that unfathomable comparison: Obama is like Bush.

When the president reversed his own position from April and decided to keep the detainee abuse photos unseen, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wasted little time in painting the two together with the same brush stroke.

“The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, said this week.

The president’s closest allies, still off balance after an upper-cut from the man they knew would change everything, could not have realized there was more to come on that front in the same week.

Obama then announced Friday that he was maintaining Bush’s military commissions for a means to deal with alleged terrorist detainees.

At that moment, there was an audible gasp in the city as the left was left struggling to figure out how “yes we can” became “who is this?”

Amnesty International stopped short of making the poisonous comparison between 44 and 43, but there was talk of “broken campaign promises”; dangerous territory for a president right out of the gate.

The White House is obviously and understandably perplexed by the comparison of Obama to Bush.

{mosads}White House press secretary Robert Gibbs spent the first part of last week delicately dancing around questions posed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been more visible with Obama in office than he was as Bush’s No. 2.

Then change happened.

“You know, I think you started out on Monday wondering why — in questioning why — why we were being so much like — so much — so opposite of George Bush in all of these questions,” Gibbs said. “And on Friday, I’m answering questions about why are we so much like George Bush on all of these questions.”

The Obama administration argued Friday, and rightly so, that the president is seeking significant increases in detainee rights when it comes to the commissions. And Obama has undoubtedly taken a distinctly different course than Bush in virtually every area in a very short amount of time, quickly and more often than not with the stroke of a pen on an executive order.

But the comparisons have started. The mark of Bush is there. And in cases like these, the perception all but obscures the details.

Gibbs said Friday that “first and foremost, the president of the United States is going to do what he believes is in the best security interests of the people of the United States.”

To some of the president’s allies, a line like that sounds all too familiar, and words like change, hope and transparency might be starting to seem all too distant.