On July 2nd, I attended a session given by Glenn Greenwald at the Socialism 2011 conference in Chicago. He began the speech by discussing the fact that even a year ago if he had attempted to give a speech observing that Obama has not only continued but in some cases enhanced the Bush/Cheney attacks on civil liberties he would have had to spend all of his time attempting to convince his audience that this was true.
People just instinctively found it repellent—the idea that this wonderfully, sophisticated, educated, progressive, constitutional lawyer, who ran on a platform of denouncing these policies and vowing to unroot them and reverse them, would actually be continuing and in many cases actually worsening them. It was just something that despite the abundance of evidence proving it was true was something that people intuitively reacted to in a negative way. You had to spend a great deal of time persuading them that it was actually the case by assembling all the evidence to prove it.