For many who follow national security affairs, one of the most vexing questions about the Obama administration has been how, after entering office promising different approaches to fighting terrorism than the Bush administration pursued, it has ended up in a number of cases actually continuing or expanding the Bush policies. New York Times journalist Charlie Savage examines what happened in Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency (Little, Brown, $30), providing the most comprehensive and revealing account so far of how current policies on drones, detentions, military tribunals, surveillance, leak investigations, and other national security matters have evolved. Savage portrays the Obama team as one led largely by lawyers who have focused on adding new legal justifications for existing practices rather than eliminating them. The result, Savage says, is that Barack Obama is likely to be seen “as less a transformative post-9/11 president than a transitional one.”
The history you’ll read here has never been told: how corporations and politicians from both parties have convinced white middle class voters to vote against policies that benefit them by strategically using subtle, racially charged messages. Here this not as an accusation, so much as a call to take personal responsibility-- Haney Lopez points out that while we are all complicit in the perpetuation of dog whistle politics, as he calls these coded messages, voters who recognize that race has entered a conversation are more likely to make decisions free of racial paranoia. It's vitally important, then, to read this well-researched book: to understand for yourself how we came to have a "white man's party," and to more accurately interpret political platforms.
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