The GOP is still trying to beat him as soft on terrorism (eg Iran) despite Obama being the most hawkish Democrat in living memory and having a string of wins to his credit (bin Laden, Gaddhafi, umpteen lesser threats eliminated). If he wins re-election and the Democrats improve their representation in Congress, then incremental changes tot he TSA may come in a few years. FBI stats suggest that Al-Qaeda type terror attacks on the US have declined in both number and severity over the last 3 years, but it will be some years before a political consensus emerges about that. Crime figures have been falling since the 90s, and and yet there have been few politicians willing to embrace penal reform lest the trend prove fickle. Neither the political system nor the general public takes a rational approach to existential threats of this kind.
despite Obama being the most hawkish Democrat in living memory
I'm afraid to say that you're the victim of propaganda. Yes, Obama is hawkish (to the chagrin of many of his early supporters). But Democrats tend to get us into wars more frequently than Republicans do:
* VietNam - in fact our escalated presence there was directly caused by LBJ's misrepresentation of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident [1].
* Korean War - this occurred under the watch of Truman, another Democrat [2].
* WWII - FDR was keen to get into the war against Germany in order to aid our allies (can't quickly find a citation, sorry).
* WWI - Woodrow Wilson, another Democrat.
The fact is that most American wars in the past century were entered under a Democratic administration.
'In living memory' was stretching it a bit, I suppose - I ought to have said 'in my lifetime (1970->).
On the other hand, I can't really agree with your criteria for inclusion; in both WW 1 and 2 the US only entered the war after direct provocations (the sinking of the Lusitania and the attack on Pearl Harbor, respectively) and while entry into the Korean war was optional, there were strong strategical imperatives as Communism presented a much greater existential threat to the US in 1950; the USSR had exploded it's first atomic bomb in 1949, and China had fallen to Mao's Communists late that same year. I don't regard it as hawkish to respond militarily to significant emergent threats or actual attacks. You are quite right aout LBJ and Vietnam, though.
My underlying point stands, I think: Obama has shown himself to be far more comfortable deploying military force than many expected, and has had several apparent successes; but Republicans still attack him frequently on national security issues, and will continue to do so given that it's an election year. He needs a fresh electoral mandate before he can propose dialing back the TSA or DHS in general.
