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OPINION

5 Things To Like About Obama

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

As President Barack Obama's second term commences, I thought I'd write about the things I liked in his first term. Here are five:

1) Obama is a great role model -- and not simply as a black American who broke racial barriers. Obama is a strong role model for the adult male -- a husband who cherishes his wife, a father who nurtures his daughters. Obama has shown the country how a youthful yet mature man takes care of his family.

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2) Obama authorized the mission that brought Osama bin Laden to justice.

3) Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the infamous 100-1 disparity -- the federal mandatory minimum sentence for 5 grams of crack cocaine was the same as the sentence for 500 grams of powder cocaine -- to 18-1. To some purists, the law didn't go far enough. The 18-1 disparity falls too heavily on African-Americans, who represented 82.7 percent of crack convictions in 2007 -- whereas whites and Latinos represented 71.4 percent of powder cocaine offenders. But the measure also ended a mandatory minimum sentence for crack possession -- and that represented the first time Washington had terminated a mandatory minimum sentence since Richard Nixon was president.

4) Obama stepped up the Secure Communities program, which allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to cross-check fingerprints from local law enforcement. Thus, though the administration deported close to 400,000 illegal immigrants annually, ICE was able to focus on individuals convicted of crimes.

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5) As a candidate, Obama pledged to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. In 2009, the president signed an executive order to close Guantanamo; after bipartisan congressional opposition in 2011, Obama signed an executive order to keep it running. PolitiFact rates Obama's Guantanamo pledge as a "promise broken."

But that's OK. He's a Democrat. So there's only muted outrage from the civil rights community.

When Obama hired Jennifer Daskal, a former Human Rights Watch attorney who had advocated closing Guantanamo, to serve as an attorney at the National Security Division, the right went nuts. Keep America Safe -- the former vice president's daughter Liz Cheney is on its board -- warned that Daskal and other like-minded attorneys would turn the Department of Justice into the "Department of Jihad."

Daskal moved on from the Justice Department to Georgetown Law. On Jan. 11, she wrote a piece in The New York Times, headlined "Don't Close Guantanamo." Daskal described the prison as a "communal" facility where detainees can "eat, pray and exercise together." Shuttering Gitmo and transferring the remaining detainees to federal penitentiaries, she warned, might isolate them.

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You can say goodbye to what Obama once called "the false choice between our security and our ideals." When a Democrat is in the White House, national security comes first; human rights advocates can be co-opted, and drones are king. That's a good thing.

As John Yoo -- the University of California, Berkeley law professor who, as a George W. Bush administration attorney, authorized the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques -- once told me, "I'm glad they're hypocrites."

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