This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 7, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

After his 2008 presidential campaign paid such voluminous lip service to civil liberties, Barack Obama has been a serious

disappointment as president and now as Democrats leave their convention their

platform has largely been scrubbed of language supporting civil liberties.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

One of the many frivolous pseudo-controversies revolving around the Democratic Convention was the omission in the 2012

platform of a reference to God that had been included in the 2008 platform which

caused Democrats to scurry to shoehorn a reference in.

Sadly what has gotten less commentary is an observation made by the mother Jones writer Adam Surwer that a lot of very strong

civil liberties language that we found in the 2008 Democratic platform something that was really a consistent

theme of Barack Obama's campaign part of his appeal as a former constitutional

law professor is absolutely absent in the 2012 platform.

So for example we see references to indefinite detention in the 2008 platform and how the Democratic

party rejects this idea of indefinite detention as opposed to bringing

prisoners to trial.

And we see that that, of course, has vanished

as the Obama administration has essentially

carried on the Bush policy of detaining

those captives that it doesn't believe it can charge with anything in an actual court.

And perhaps most conspicuously, we see an absolute silence on issues of warrantless surveillance, the Patriot Act,

and other war on terror surveillance measures that were subject to pretty heavy critique in the

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