And we shouldn't really have expected him to either ... I find that curious, though, because he went into the election with a relatively conservative platform.

And we shouldn't really have expected him to either ... I find that curious, though, because he went into the election with a relatively conservative platform. There are at least three different levels to view this at. And thanks to the myth of the rational voter, there are plenty of people who decide that the appearance at one level is sufficient, and the cost/benefit of digging deeper isn't worthwhile. On the surface, Obama was happy to allow people to believe something different even from what he was actually saying. Many pacifists supported him on this basis. A level deeper, Obama was never anti-war. If you go back to the record, his only anti-war statements were specific to Iraq. He disliked the politics of that particular war, but never came out as a pacifist (contra those only looking skin-deep). Deeper than that, we've got to consider political motivations behind his anti-Iraq-war stance. In retrospect it appears that this was largely a political position that was easy for Obama to take on because it entailed undermining GWB's (arguably illegally assumed) authority, thus shifting power away from the GOP and toward the DEMs. In this light, it's hardly surprising that he's chosen to eschew his opposition to unilateral executive power: when the shoe was on the other foot, he was able to obtain further political advantage by doubling down on the same abuses that he'd criticized just a few years earlier.