Because blaming Obama is racist.
Via Politico:
President Barack Obama has given progressives plenty to be angry at him for lately: The liberal wish list he laid out at his second inaugural remains just that. Then came revelations of sweeping domestic surveillance programs that triggered flashbacks to the ultimate villains of the left, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Yet despite all of that, Democratic activists on hand here for the largest annual gathering of progressives cut the president a surprising amount of slack. Yes, they’re unhappy about Obama embracing Bush-era snooping. And they think he hasn’t done nearly enough on climate change or other issues they had high hopes for when they helped propel Obama past Hillary Clinton in 2008.
But two dozen people interviewed by POLITICO at the Netroots Nation conference this week agreed, in broad strokes, that a broken Congress and leftover Bush-era policies deserve at least as much blame as the president. The National Security Agency controversy may be headline news — on Friday night, news broke that federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against NSA contractor Edward Snowden for allegedly leaking classified information — but it was barely mentioned in a series of speeches kicking off the conference.
“When we’re talking about these things in regards to the president, we can’t leave out Congress,” said Gina Cooper, founder of Netroots Nation. “People are definitely looking toward the administration for answers … what they’re not hearing about is checks and balances.”
Said Jonathan Dale, a 42-year-old Planned Parenthood activist from San Diego: “The NSA stuff that came out was disappointing but not surprising.” But “it’s a legacy from the Bush era.”
His colleague, Rachel Dixon, 35, agreed: “I always kind of assumed that our emails weren’t private,” she said.
The idea that Bush, not Obama, was responsible for putting these programs in place came up time and again.
HT: Rare