As my colleague Mike
Riggs
reported last night, the Obama administration is pondering ways
to undermine the pot legalization laws that voters in Colorado and
Washington state passed last month. Over at The Huffington
Post, Radley Balko responds with a
roundup of Obama boosters who
assured us during the campaign that the president would back
away from the drug war after he’d been safely
reelected. Here’s Lawrence O’Donnell in April, for
example:

Although President Obama thinks it’s entirely
legitimate to have a conversation about whether our drug laws are
doing more harm than good, he has absolutely no intention of having
that discussion in the United States until after he is reelected to
a second term. With exactly 204 days remaining until the election,
that makes possibly ending the war on drugs the 204th reason to
vote for President Obama on November 6th.

That may or may not have worked as a get-out-the-vote drive, but
as a prediction it looks like it was exactly backwards. Obama
wasn’t waiting for his second term to bring up an issue that’s too
hot for the voters. The voters themselves have shoved the issue
onto the agenda, and second-term Obama is looking for ways to shove
it back.